Comments like this do very little to achieve what, I assume, you want to achieve. People need to know that it is the volume of complaints, not the severity of the few, that prompted this blog post. Your choice of words immediately puts your comment in the ‘ignore’ pile.

I personally do not like the change much either. But it is the complaints that methodically bring to light significant issues that will be ‘heard.’ To do otherwise is to shout into an empty room.

But I can understand that it is hard to stay political correct if confronted with such a stupid idea. And I also wish that they will loose a lot of customers, because that might be the only way to make them reconsider this.

Are you insane? They ARE listening. At least enough to re-evaluate their model. That’s the point of this blog post. Don’t be an ass if they’re actually stating that they’re listening. Lets see what they come back with. At least they’re attempting to listen to their customer base.

My company frequently has short projects at customers where having a pro version of PyCharm etc would be very beneficial (I pay for IntelliJ personally, at home, for my android dev work), but the comparatively small client companies are usually unwilling to shell out 180€ for 1-2 months of the IDE. Rented, this goes to 8-16€, a price *easily* sold to the customer as part of the contract.

Yes, I know, they ought to not care about a price as small as 180€. But they do, so yeah, I like the idea of monthly payment for these situations.

So JetBrain’s response is to be hateful and attack their customers? They hate us. Ripping us off like this proves it. I know when I called for support, they constantly tried to make me feel like an idiot. Their support is so hateful So hateful.

We bought 40 licenses, then you refused to help us even get your garbage to run. Your crap simply doesn’t work. Yes, I understand Windows is complete garbage, and all of the Microsoft-created problems are not your fault, but when we pay for support, we expect you to at least try to help. Insulting us is not what we want when we gave you so much money.

No he says that if all you do is drool spittle over the floor, they won’t bother to read your feedback.

Learn to articulate yourself. Provide feedback. Don’t act like a whiny kid after they got the toy which was 2″ smaller than the one their brother got, no one will *ever* listen to you in the business world that way.

His comment is fine. He has achieved what he wanted .. to let jetbrains know he is really really REALLY pissed off.

As far as the “ignore pile” comment? your really really REALLY naive aren’t you? Any well run company is going to have some poor schmuck tasked with tracking all the comments into a spread sheet … and this guys comment just ticked up the “really really pissed” category.

As far as the company listening? This is more like damage control … the only thing missing from the post was the sentence: “We take this sort of thing very serious and can assure you this matter has our utmost attention” … blah blah blah.

Comments like this will achieve whatever they hope to achieve. Companies must cater to consumer irrationality because their survival depends on our satisfaction however stupid our demands are. Don’t be a fish, don’t let companies like apple or microsoft control what you pay for, you have a voice, you are a customer. Don’t give up what little power you have because you are afraid of looking immature or stupid. You are a customer, and you have rights. DEMAND what you want and let it be heard.

That being said, this comment is neither immature or stupid. Nobody wants to change the current licensing model. We want to own fucking products, not rent them. Hoping that jetbrains loses customers due to this licensing change to they will switch back to the old model is

I don’t get all the invective. I love the idea. A car mechanic’s toolbox from Snap-On can cost $25k. These are the best IDEs I’ve ever used – they’re WAAAAY better than Eclipse or anything else – and you’re saying I can have all of them for $13 – $19/mo per team member, including the ones I couldn’t cost-justify until now? (I pay for IntelliJ ultimate but not AppCode.)

That whole comment below about keeping software for 5 years is stupid. It works with Office because the Word from 5 years ago is still a fine document editor. An IDE isn’t like that – I update constantly to keep up with new languages like ES6, TypeScript, new JDKs, etc. I can’t even imagine using a 3-year-old copy of Eclipse or IntelliJ to do today’s work.

I ditched Eclipse, NetBeans, and Komodo because IntelliJ is better. The tools I use to make my living, and enjoy doing it, are TOTALLY worth the price of a few cups of Starbucks. Sign me up.

But what works for you doesn’t have to work for another person. For example an indie developer or freelance developer won’t always have the money to immediately renew. With the old license model that didn’t really matter since when they couldn’t afford they could just use the old version till the time had come where the upgrade would be worth the money to spend on. But in the new model if you don’t pay it stops working. Do you now see the invective a bit more?

I don’t think you get the point. Sub models basically hold the customer hostage. That’s fine when it’s something like entertainment but not cool when core to your livelihood.

If they were concerned with “entry level”, they could *offer* sub mode … then auto switch over to “you payed enough sub, you now own it”. Old cost for storm was $50 … so when you paid say $75, you owned it.

No .. this is a money grab, pure and simple. Might benefit some people, but probably hurts the majority.

I have bought and own several Jetbrains product including PHPStorm, RubyMine and PyCharms. Love all 3. Looking at buying PyCharms or RubyMine for a few of my Kids who are homeschooled (so no Ed pricing). But subscription only model is not good for us. I might consider on the kids. But on my stuff I don’t need the latest on PHP as my customer’s intranets are “frozen” in time for foreseeable future. This adds more cost to our operation and then when have to patch a PHP file our PHPStorm (if we upgrade) would be deactivated.

I urge you to reconsider and offer the traditional perpetual licensing along side this option as I can see merit in each.

What a bullshit reaction, I know indie developers who invested everything into a product they were working on and they have had rough months where they hardly could get by. So instead of paying xxx amount of money and being to always use that IDE you now are hostage to the licensing model where it stops working when you can’t pay.

Sometimes it’s access to the right tools that help you become the better developer. That is most certainly the case with the IDEA suite of tooling.

Regardless, SAAS doesn’t benefit every customer. If I’m completely content with the current version of my IDE, why should I be forced to upgrade/switch? Especially if it requires more horsepower or a new OS or has new features I don’t want or a new layout that I don’t like? Suddenly I lose access to the version of the software that I love, that helps me, AND I’m forced to pay for the privilege? And if I don’t pay, then I lose access completely?

How, as a developer, knowing how passionate we are about our tech stacks, does this new business model help?

If I just want a taste? This is great. If I just need it for a short project, this is fantastic…but if this is my bread and butter? It just hurts.

Besides, it’s not apples to apples comparison. 25K would be a one time hit, and are tangible goods that are resealable. So if the mechanic decided to change professions, he might get 20K or more from the tools.

I completely agree with this statement. I only have ReSharper and WebStorm, but I would gladly sign up today if such an option were available specifically because of all the other IDEs I would have access to.

Seriously, sign me up now – whatever price structure is ultimately chosen, we can do an adjustment on the cost.

I do see the need to have a perpetual license. Microsoft has moved to a hybrid full cost/subscription model for Visual Studio as well, mostly because of banks and military contractors having airgapped networks, it’s not always feasible to have the IDEs phone home to check the license.

I think may work like this – yearly option only, you get any updates in that year, updates locked out afterwards unless you renew the subscription. This is the “full cost” price option that doesn’t go dead. It’s not much different than today’s model.

The monthly pricing structure license doesn’t include this feature and goes dead. It requires monthly phone homes to JetBrains, much like Visual Studio does today. The license given to the IDE determines the death date.

Considering their complete and utter lack of support, why would this push you over the edge? If you had dealt with them in the past, you would have already decided to stop your suffering.

Charging us per minute for using your software is an advantage to the customer. Then when their customer support refuses to do their job, we drop the subscription immediately rather than being forced to pay for the rest of the year for nothing. For nothing!

This comment is not immature. Nor is it stupid. Not wanting a stupid subscription model is a reasonable demand. I want to own products, not rent products. This is not unreasonable at all. Hoping jetbrains loses enough customers to prevent them from switching to a new model is a reasonable hope.

Well, in average I guess that I have bought 1 license in 3 years,
so clearly I’m not the kind of customer that they yearn for,
but even if they sold the subscription based license for 1EUR/year
I would not dare to use such a tool for any of my projects, no matter
how good the tool otherwise is, because there is the inherent
insecurity that I will be without the possibility to use the tool, should
they decide that they suddenly, due to Russian Import/Export sanctions,
do not want to renew my license, not to mention the myriads of
business world insecurities that can just make sure that they
are not able to renew the license even after going bankrupt.

Security and reliability also has value and when doing huge
investment, which all long-lasting software projects certainly are,
the development process security and reliability of tools is a
serious concern, at least for me, not so much to web developers,
who just do one-off projects that they just dump the moment
their client has wired the money to them.

Of course, Silicon Valley is, probably, the main target audience
of the JetBrains company and the American style of
avoid-thinking-ahead-at-any-cost-use-what-is-currently-popular
does not notice the insecurities and unreliability that comes from
the subscription based pricing model. On the other hand, the JetBrains
IDE is based on Java and the Oracle has put a lot of effort for
making sure that Java does not have any future outside the Oracle
business, including IDE development. The Apache Foundation
was thrown out of the Java language specification process

so in that light, may be the JetBrains people, the smart Russians
in Saint Petersburg, just want to take out the last big
chunk of money from their IDE business, while they can, and then dump the
thing. After all, the JetBrains IDE has been written in Java, in Russia,
and given the political situation in Crimea only a fool would like to buy up
a business that has its most vital assets, majority of its people,
working in Russia.

Of course, I have to declare here that I’m an Estonian, live in Estonia that borders with Russia and has a Soviet Union history.

Subscription models are fine if the subscription entitles you to updates and otherwise falls back to a perpetual no-update license. Like you say, it’s the possibility that you’ll be locked out.

I pay about $110AUD/month for Unity3d, and i hadn’t used it for about 35 days, logged in the other day, my god, I had to jump through many a hoop to get the thing to even launch- they expire/block licenses if you don’t log in for 30 days – by the time that was over the concept i wanted to rig up was lost. That lack of continuity is a BIG deal to a lot of people I think, not only enterprise/corporate deployment paradigms.

I need my tool chain within a 3 second reach for when i suddenly have to fire up a prototype and DRM/Subscriptions are shutting me out of my work flow.

If they can just hybridize the tech concepts behind subscription models affecting users rather than rampaging ahead and only focusing on the aspects that ensure their own revenue then a decent system might emerge.

I own a small software company in South Africa. I was really a big Intellij fan up to now. The new pricing model is just way too expensive small companies / individual contractors in developing counties.

We really have to make tough decisions and consider dropping Intellij from our tool box.

If you would take the feedback serious you would already have acted. It is obvious that you will never offset the destruction of customer loyalty caused by this move with the increase of earnings with a subscription model.

How long have we been waiting for them to realise that their personal license change is a mistake?

I believe we’ve been waiting about a week. I bet it took them more than a week to decide on this very bad idea. They may have been working on it for a month. I doubt they’re going to change their policy in just a week, especially considering the change doesn’t take effect until November 2, 2015.

Everyone screws up; it’s part of being human. What matters is how you respond when you screw up. Your tirade does nothing to help resolve the matter. You’ve already stated that you’re done with JetBrains, so why are you continuing to post? Be done and move on. Or stick around and try to be a productive part of the eventual outcome.

Thank you for listening.
I think both licensing models are valid, I personal dislike the subscription model, and would like to continue using my IDE if I choose not to upgrade.
I hope JetBrains is able to find a solution that is fair/reasonable to all your types of customers.

Agreed – I can’t commit to a continuous subscription for my personal copy of IntelliJ and if I’m not offered the option of a perpetual license I simply can’t continue to be a paying customer of JetBrains.

The obvious option would be to offer both the existing purchase + upgrade pricing, and also the subscription model. Make the subscription say £10/year cheaper than the upgrade pricing and everyone is happy: Jetbrains gets people renting their software rather than purchasing it, those who’re happy to rent get cheaper pricing, while those who don’t want to rent software aren’t forced to switch to Eclipse / Netbeans.

This is the model for Adobe Lightroom, which is still the market leader a couple of years after the launch of Adobe’s subscription pricing.

Please do not remove the option of subscription for personal. I like having the latest version, especially as one expects to use new versions of PHP as they are released which will require an upgraded IDE supporting the new versions. For people like me who want the upgrades, the subscription saves me money!

Aside from the people who do not want/need constant upgrades, there is an additional fear introduced by the introduction of a subscription model. The company can become complacent and too comfortable with no longer improving their products at the same level they currently do. The existing incentive of continuing to improve the product in order to get people to upgrade can vanish if everyone is automatically on a recurring subscription. The money keeps rolling in without having to do any substantial work, so why invest in new development? This isn’t to say JetBrains has to fall into this category, but it’s a possibility. If your employees’ culture changes to reflect the new greedy reality, your products could suffer and fall apart in favor of your competitors.

Obviously subscription should just be an option. Hell, even increase the cost of a permanent license – but don’t remove that option. You really will have people leaving in droves, even if I am not one of them.

To clarify, I’m actually not happy with the new subscription model. I am one who will upgrade every year, but when the time comes that I decide to stop paying, I expect to maintain my existing version of the software. So a subscription model that retains a perpetual license upon cancellation. Now that I think of it, this is what is currently in place, and so I suppose I am *not* in favor of the new subscription model. My original line of thinking was solely that so long as I am a recurring customer I would save money with the new pricing.

But you’re damn right I expect to retain the right to use the most recent version of software I have paid for. You really think disabling my software after years of payment would be acceptable?

Offer 4 models and let users choose what works best for them:
1) Buy (perpetual license) w/ 1yr support (upgrades) + upgrade price for add’l year support (i.e. the pricing model we have today)
2) Pure subscription with no perpetual license (what you are suggesting for tomorrow)
3) Buy (perpetual license) w/ subscription for support (a mix of #1 and #2 where there is a high entry fee with a low monthly subscription, as long as you keep it perpetual)
4) Volume license stuff where big enterprise concerns are handled and I’m not going to get into details.

If you offer these 4 models, then I think you can allow all of your customers to be happy. And hell, give me a calculator for me to figure out which one works best for me.

Now that I read what I posted, I bet JetBrains is going to think, “Man, that sounds complicated!”.

MAYBE a way to simplify it is this:
Go with a pure subscription model, as you proposed. BUT give me an option to also walk away from that subscription model with a perpetual license in one of the following cases. This moves the complexity away from the primary sales process and pricing models over to just this special case licensing situation. Let’s just call it “Upgrading qualifying subscription licenses to perpetual licenses” and let the below be the fine print.
1) I pay X amount to convert to perpetual (give me the ability to sign up for a 1 month subscription without auto-renew turned on so it is effectively a one-time purchase in practice)
2) I’m an existing customer who gets that perk for free
3) I have paid for Y consecutive months of the subscription (Y = 6, maybe?)
4) I already have a current perpetual license and I have paid for Y * 0.5 months of the subscription (shorter duration in #3 but 1 month may not be enough)

While this isn’t exactly perfect, I think this allows for your subscription model to be the focus/standard/happy path for most users yet allowing for the concerns of your other users.

Most of the subscriptions we have at work are all lock-out subscriptions. GitHub Enterprise being the one that causes a huge out-cry across the offices when people in charge forget to renew licenses; as we’re all locked out of source code.

I am personally in favour of the subscription model, it’s much easier, and easier on accounting being a service rather than capital expense.

And really, $3/wk for software is a steal for such a valuable product.

My only issue is with the 30 day no internet access restriction, as I often spend months on end with no ability to connect to the Internet; when in Central Asia.

In your twitter there was a goo idea, as i think – if someone pays a year subscription, he will get lifetime license for only this version. Updates wil be only in prolongation.
But if you prefer monthly paying – no lifetime license.

My main issue with the new model is only that if I stop paying I can no longer use the product, I would add something along the lines of “If you have paid for the license for longer than X months” (you decide X but at least 6 and no more than 12) you get the right to keep running that version forever (not just major but minors too)”
So basically having a subscription will ensure that you are always updated, and after some time subscribing you get the version where the product is at forever, if you stop paying”.

That is a model which we have now with perpetual licenses. You buy a product and you have year of free updates (= 12 months subscription) + you own it. If you want further updates you have to pay for upgrade (= another 12 months subscription). The only difference is that currently upgrade cost half of initial product.

If subscription and perpetual licenses should live together there will have to be significant price difference between these two models to make it attractive.

I think it probably would have worked out better for you if the previous perpetual scheme was kept at the same or a 10-15% higher price point, and your subscription scheme cut existing prices by a healthy enough margin to incite people that actually want to use all of the tools or don’t mind being locked in to pay.

The relative few (by way of comments) that don’t care about their rights being taken away by subscription software would be even more overjoyed than they are now, and a large portion of everyone else would have stepped up and paid a little more.

Sure there would have been grumbling and probably a few would have thrown out the “I’ll never darken your door again!”, but lets face it; that sort of thing is just inevtiable.

One thing seems pretty clear from the comments made thus far, both here and in the original post; when it comes to the tools of your livelyhood (or your hobby), it is VERY much an ideological standpoint that when you pay for something you expect to have unrestricted use of it, and it is not about the money at all.

Being in that exact camp myself, all of the comments about “how much money this saves” or how “you need to spend money to make money” or “you would have upgraded every year anyway” don’t come across the way you think.

Presumably you (the royal you; i.e. everyone saying that, not just someone at JetBrains) assume that it’s all about the bottom line. It’s not. As foreign as it is to YOU to understand why someone would complain about paying less for the same thing, that’s how foreign it is to US that someone would blithely and willingly pay less money for the right to actually LOSE rights.

As far as I can see, human nature being what it is, there’s no way for anyone in either camp to actively “convert” someone from the opposite side into their way of thinking.

I have loved using your software for several years. I’ve bought personal licenses for several products, and I liked them so much, I convinced my employer (a small development shop) to switch full-time to your software for our development needs. However, your subscription model is unsustainable. I cannot afford personally to rent my IDEs and have them simply cease functioning if I can’t justify the expenditure. My employer cannot as well.

If we cannot continue to use your products as we already do, we will need to look elsewhere. I love your software, but this is a simple matter of economics.

Well, they are a de facto Russian company, despite the legalities, and things do not look bright with the Ruble falling, Putin hunting down foreign currency “cash cows”, probably planning to expand the war effort from Crimea to other regions, Estonia (my home region), and so on and so forth.
So, the JetBrains business leadership HAS VERY GOOD and HUMANELY LEGITIMATE REASON to wrap things up as fast as possible, squeeze the last buck out of their customers.

I actually feel sorry for the people, who worked hard on JetBrains. It is their crown jewel, a really beautiful one. But, they did know, where they lived and unlike the people in Europe, including Estonia, the Russians in Saint Petersburg do not want to cut themselves loose from the Kremlin. One of the excuses of the American declaration of independence was that the American colony does not want to bare the economic side-effects of the British wars. I have not heard that the people in Saint Petersburg wanted to form their own state, independent of the Kremlin, a Northern European style state. They just bare all the consequences of the Kremlin activity despite the fact that they are one of the most richest regions of the modern Russia.

I take you to be intelligent person. I don’t like that this is expanding into politics but please do not blame Russia. I respect the independence of Estonia but Crimea would stay in Ukraine if USA did not fund government overthrow in Ukraine. Russia is just defending it’s own interest. I don’t have a horse in this race. I rely on common sense.

You have 25% of Russian citizens in your country. Respect them, be respected and live in peace. If you are in any way attacked that is because you are cooking something with EU (read USA), and Russia would as any other country defend its interests. They just do not want USA/NATO missiles on Russian border. If you let NATO runa show, expect to be bullied by Russia. That is just survival instinct.

Point me at one country that USA helped and that they are doing good. Just one.

Back to JetBrains. Guys rethink your plan. I was WebStorm advocate until you came with this toolbox thing. I can go along with tweaked a bit price but not to pay 3x more than before. Also I do not want a relationship with you by signing into your model. I just want a mutual respect. That is why I started using WebStorm few years back. Let me have my license and yearly upgrades with features worth paying like so far.

Are you okay? Is it very hot and your air conditioning failed? I think you accidentally wrote on the wrong website. You must have accidentally clicked on one of the tabs with your reddit discussions. This is the forum for an IDE, and this is about programming computers. All fine?

By the way, the headquarter of Jetbrains is in the Czech Republic (are you going to read this as “Chechen Republic” and now place the company in the Caucasus?).

I’ll stick to my last permanent license until the subscription model becomes a) another option instead of the only option or b) the permanent license model is returned. I really dislike the subscription model, especially when the overall pricing is significantly higher. It felt pretty shady realizing what the overall cost was going to be when compared to the permanent license model.

I really enjoy JetBrains software but I’m willing to move away if I have to.

I use the personal license even though my employer offered to pay for my tools, because I want to use it at home too. Not every programmer has consistent work. A subscription model works if you lower the price, otherwise you’ve just locked everyone into a commitment they might not be able to pay for every month. And of course, if they can’t pay the software shuts down—and then they definitely can’t pay.

Now I’m faced with a tough decision: upgrade to lock in my $49/year price (when I might not necessarily want to upgrade that year or not), or don’t upgrade to keep my perpetual license but lose all support in ~6 months.

Instead of facing something new and useful I feel like I’ve been backed into a corner. Either I’m forced to pay, or else, or I don’t pay and can use the tool indefinitely without updates. I don’t like either choice. Especially because if I lose that discount I’ll have to go with the $99/year price, which won’t make me happy.

I agree that something needs to be done for polyglot programmers. However, I feel like this punishes the monoglot programmers. I don’t know what it is, but we need something beneficial to both.

I know this might not be published in the uproar that’s going on, but I hope you at least read and consider it.

I love ReSharper (I even did a usergroup talk on it once), but I am a bit sad about this. Forcing people to pay up or else they lose the ability to use the product is quite an out-of-character decision for JetBrains. Adobe have done similar with Lightroom and PhotoShop, but they have (at least for now) retained the *option* to pay a single fee for an upgrade license to use the software in perpetuity. For businesses who typically renew regularly anyway, I can’t see how the subscription model helps, and it downright hurts individuals (including OSS contributors) who would probably only upgrade every other year to save money. Like some here have said, a subscription model could conceivably run alongside the existing “lump sum in exchange for a perpetual license”. I can see why any company would be looking to see where they can make more money, but it’s a big risk to go down this road.

The challenge with OSS is those who have an OSS project they’ve published, but perhaps not a rich forum or community around it such that it meets your criteria. I’m being very selfish here. The subscription model is fine for companies who can afford it (and are upgrading every year anyway), it’s people like me who want to know that if they can’t afford the upgrade they can still at least use the version they have, even if they won’t get updates for it. To plough large sums of money over time into something and then one day it could be turned off because you can’t justify *additional* spending, leaving you with nothing to show for it, would be upsetting. Doing without ReSharper would be a royal pain in the ass, but for some, it would mean they can’t use their favourite IDE at all and so they switch to something totally different or their project dies.

To be clear, I think the backlash is just over the difference between renting and buying. When you rent you have nothing to show for your outlay if you decide to or are forced to stop. This will affect individuals and very small shops more than larger corporations (who probably keep up to date anyway and always will).

However, I don’t own, because if one moves within 10 years, renting yields higher net worth after 10 years than owning. (On average for the last 25 years, toronto area, total personal net-worth was better off renting than buying up until you spent 20 years in a house without moving, anything less, and the transaction/commission/fees, ended up having people who rented housing, rather than renting money [mortgage], ended up with more equity and net worth.) — caveat, it’s usually, renters having better financials/networth by only 10% on average, 20% if the time period entered was Jan 1, 2009, or just after the dot-com bubble in 2001.

Indeed, for the past 5 years, I’m way ahead than those who bought houses after the 2009 slaughter (who are still ahead, just not by not as much)

Unless you pay for your house, you’re paying rent on money; rather than rent on accomodations.

If you can lease ten cars for $1000 each or rent 10 cars for $1000 per year, which would you choose? And bear in mind that you would need to pay maintenance on each of the ten purchased cars going forward.

I’m personally OK with this. Practically it’s a minor change, because I tend not to use out of date IDEs, given that a big part of JetBrains’ value is provided by supporting the latest and greatest languages and frameworks.

I have upgraded through several versions of WebStorm over the past few years and, overall, I’m quite satisfied with the improvements and enhancements that JetBrains has added along the way. It seems that a lot of users think that JetBrains can do that for free. Well, skilled developers are not willing to work for a cot to sleep on and a pot of gruel.

The price that Microsoft charges for each annual MSDN subscription is $900 to $1600 US. Being able to support my javascript hobbies for $79/year is a fair deal. Keep up the great work, JetBrains! And I will happily pay you for your great products.

Is there any chance you could offer PyCharm and WebStorm together for $119/year? It looks like I’ll need PyCharm to get into machine learning.

“It seems that a lot of users think that JetBrains can do that for free.”
Could you hint me to at least one posting where somebody wants anything for free? Those who are complaining are paying customers.

Randall didn’t say that folk wanted something for free. What he said was:

“It seems that a lot of users think that JetBrains can do that for free.”

That is completely different.

What many people are saying here is that they want the option to skip versions that don’t offer any new functionality that they need. If the upgrade revenues drop significantly then Jetbrains will not be able to fix existing bugs and they will not be able initiate new projects (I’ve noticed that they have been very quiet on the version control system they’d started working on). If the upgrades drop significantly then they will be working for free – and not being paid isn’t going to work for their staff.

I always buy the upgrade even if it doesn’t bring any major functionality that I need. Why? Because if everyone stops buying upgrades then within the space of three years I’ll be back using Eclipse, and I don’t want that to happen.

I agree, and I would like to add that another reason to buy an upgraded version is to get bug fixes in the version that you currently have, not just to get a new feature.

Now, my in my case there are several bugs in the IntelliJ core that slow down my work because I spend more and more time working around them. Since they are in the core, they affect all of the tools I use.

I was thinking of maybe giving the next version a miss to see what would come down the pipe, because I don’t think that constantly focusing on some big new feature or features is really working for them; bugs pile up in old and new features and you end up with a mish-mash of semi-usable features.

Yes, in the end in comes down to what happens when you stop paying. It also comes down to what happens if you are for some reason FORCED to stop paying (i.e. temporarily lose your job, etc), what happens when something stops it from being able to phone home, and most importantly, what happens in the company decides to just stop developing it all together, and a myriad of others.

Personally I find the idea of renting software abhorrent and I’m not even fully in the position that I use it to make a living; it’s just an ideological thing.

However if one of the many schemes that have been presented that would allow my version to keep working if I had to/needed to/wanted to stop paying were in place, I would have no problem.

Further, if doing this allowed them to actually focus on bugs for a while, or do something where there was a point release every month that was purely focused on finding and squashing bugs, I would be about 2000% in favour.

Noone wants anything for free, I think the backlash is just over the difference between renting and buying. When you rent you have nothing to show for your outlay if you decide to or are forced to stop. This will affect individuals and very small shops more than larger corporations (who probably keep up to date anyway and always will).

I’ve been a loyal Jetbrains customer for over 12 years. I’ve been paying for a personal license as I switch between employers and locations and gigs. I have licenses for three of your products, and I have no use for the rest. With your pricing scheme, you’ll require someone in my position to pay $28 per month to access them, or pay for the full suite even though only 3 will ever be used.

If this approach doesn’t change (or changes very little), I’m going to stop advocating for your products, and perhaps stop using some of them entirely. It’s probably time I start paying attention to Sublime or Atom.

I did say “pay for the full suite even though only 3 will ever be used” and that I’m waiting to see if they change their approach.

My point in mentioning that is they attempted to bundle different products together, but none of them work for me. From this perspective, this solution is not better for the customer, but significantly better for them.

I hope this changes. Otherwise, I’ll keep using Intellij, but I’ll probably drop the other IDEs. Also, there’s no way I can keep convincing others to use their product while they’re using a subscription model. I wouldn’t want to do to others what they are doing to me.

Glad you’re listening. As our company has decisions to make soon, I hope you act quickly, too.

Granted, this new rental concept (SAAS, whatever; it’s a fee for temporary use) is OK for users who may or may not need your products on any given day, but for the hard-core IDE users, we need to know our tools are available, and we need to choose when and if we update based on the features in the new version (For what it’s worth, I always update my license each year for Jetbrains, because it’s been worth it… so far).

The fact is that as a professional, I like to own the tools I use daily (even if they’re a little old, at least they’re trusted and available). Amateurs might enjoy renting a là Adobe, but I don’t. In fact, I consider myself a die-hard JetBrains user (renewing annually as I like to keep current), but at one point, I was also a die-heard Adobe customer. (Adobe adopted a similar “service on your hard drive” strategy with version CS6).

Today, I dust off my 2011 copy of CS5.5 every once in a while, but I haven’t sent a dime Adobe’s way since they went into the rental business years ago.

I’m not sure how you’ve managed to turn this into an elitist issue, but I can assure you that an aversion to subscription models isn’t what defines a professional. With regards to the Adobe example, I’d much rather employ a designer who is familiar with the latest features of Adobe over someone who is 4 years behind the curve.

I’m not at all saying that your viewpoint is invalid, I’m just saying it’s very, very subjective.

I loved the software, but if you insist on this model, I will no longer buy or recommend it. There are alternatives and considering the increase in critical bugs lately as well as decrease in useful features over the last couple major versions (at least for phpstorm), it seems like now is the time to explore them. I hope you change your mind, but if not, thank you for providing great software till November. You’re making a huge mistake, IMO, one that will be difficult to fix if not impossible once in place. You’ve been warned.

“if you insist on this model… I hope you change your mind… You’ve been warned.”
You have just responded to a blog post by Jetbrains pretty much saying they are reconsidering a subscription model with a comment asking them to reconsider a subscription model. While I admit they have not said that they will continue offering perpetual licenses, the sentance “We will act on this feedback.” strongly indicates that they will.

First thought when ready this: [Censored]
Second thought: Meh, I don’t want to go back to Eclipse, but I also don’t want any stupid [Censored] monthly [Censored]
Third thought: Well, one year to see what happens, perhaps they come to their senses by then or … see above.

Long-text:
As already suggested by some, e.g. here some way to (still) get a perpetual license is – in my opinion – your way to go.
I do not know where I’ll be in one year, i.e. when I would have to join in on your subscription model, but I am quite sure that I am going to avoid your software under these conditions.
(Maybe, by then I will be dumb or frustrated enough from about every other software pricing model out there, but I don’t hope so.)

Thank you for consistently both communicating and listening to your customers.

My two cents on this proposed licensing shift: I want to own a piece of software outright. If JetBrains went out of business, I shouldn’t be up a creek within 30 days. If I buy a version and want to run it for 10 years, I shouldn’t have to keep paying for it. I should only have to pay for a new version if the new features in it entice me to do so.

To those thinking that there’s no way the software would remain relevant for 10+ years, it’s because you’re in a different part of the IT world. The last place I worked still has a system running Windows 3.1; it’s for a hardware control system that hasn’t changed in 25 years. Yeah, having the latest library support is nice, but when you’re doing embedded system and hardware control programming, having a completely frozen software stack is often more important. Even seemingly small changes can break things in unexpected ways, and once the software is out of date, security depends on an air-gap or a top of the line vlan-based network. When you’re setting up software to control a $50,000+ piece of equipment, having a cutting edge IDE that can take care of the next 20 years of non-programmers who will have to stumble through writing scripts in a (by then) no longer supported language is well worth the additional $200 up front. The old system would allow for that type of use, the new system doesn’t.

That doesn’t account for things like COBOL, which are way past their prime. There haven’t been any substantial updates to these old languages in 20 years, but existing enterprise systems still use them. There are no new libraries to support, an IDE for them will basically never change. Which of today’s languages are going to die in a similar fashion in the next 20 years? I won’t want to lose my IDE just because no new projects ever use language X, and I won’t want to keep paying monthly for a software product that will never change.

I wouldn’t be willing to accept the subscription based licensing model your company is transitioning to. If after considering the complaints from the community you decide to go ahead with this plan I’ll have to abandon use of your products entirely even though I have recently renewed an IntelliJ license and purchased a license for CLion. It just wouldn’t make sense for me to continue to build software with Jet Brains tools if there is no future in them for me so I would move to a new IDE as soon as possible.

The fairest thing would be for you to refund my money for the licenses I recently purchased, but I won’t insist that you do that.

I will however be very cautious in the future supporting even small companies that sell proprietary software, especially software that I depend on.

Our shop already uses JetBrains tools. We have been buying upgrades every year. The new subscription model does not change anything for us. For example, WebStorm upgrades were $49 per year, and as existing users we will get the same price with the subscription model.

I am actually looking forward to the new model because it might reduce the pressure on JetBrains to add new features to justify an upgrade, and let them increase focus on less sexy aspects of the product, such as performance.

The new model will increase the overall expense for new users, as the new user subscription price is considerably higher than the existing user price. This will hurt user adoption rate, so you guys might want to re-consider new user pricing model.

I also agree with Neil’s comment on keeping an option for the perpetual license, perhaps just for individuals.

A lot of developers are expressing dissatisfaction with a subscription model. You might be able to force us into them, but this is because we are already hooked to your products.

If you pursue this, there will be a lot of who will stop advocating your products to other developers, even those among us who have continued to use them. This is because we are well aware that other developers will not like your subscription model. Even among those who will continue to spread the word about your products, the pricing model will turn off new people who haven’t tried your product.

I think you will lose a lot of potential customers before you can even get the chance to sell them. If I was a new developer looking for IDEs today, I never would have given your IDEs a chance based solely on the subscription pricing.

I want Jetbrains to continue to be a sustainable, profitable business – a lot of us do, and this is the reason we pay for (instead of pirating) your products. So please consider all the other ways your pricing can affect your business.

This is a huge mistake. But a subscription model is not a bad idea, either. Here’s the solution:

Let people make the choice. People can choose to pay a one-time fee for a specific version, and stay there as long as they want at no extra fee, but they get no major updates (only patches). Or, people can pay to subscribe and get continual updates. Don’t force people like Adobe CC does.

Keep in mind, many of us are NOT using multiple languages. Especially as languages like JavaScript become more and more popular.

I generally like subscription models but as it stands the new model does not benefit me. I use 2 JetBrain products (PHPStorm/AppCode), but have been thinking of adding RubyMine to my arsenal.

Currently I can extend the longevity of your software to about 2 years before I re-purchase . I like having control over this.

With this change, I have no choice but to upgrade yearly, as the subscription model adds up to the same price (If not more) as if I we’re to re-purchase yearly, without a choice.

This model worked for Adobe because their product suite was ridiculously expensive. The value exchange was that users gained affordable software, and Adobe gained long term loyalty and on-going revenue stream.

The value with this decision with JetBrains is one way, customers are not getting anything in return. JetBrains wants long term loyalty without willing to give anything in return.

Perhaps if I could subscribe to 2-3 products for a monthly fee I’d consider it. The “all” or nothing approach is a bit of a hard pill to swallow.

Adobe also had a year to test drive it when Creative Suite 6 and the first year of Creative Cloud were available side-by-side and, according to Adobe, more people went with Cloud.

Adobe also included the now-defunct Digital Publication Suite Single Edition, a top-level Typekit account, a Behance Professional account, and other benefits on top of the $600/yr for the Master Collection software (which was $2500 to buy and $900 to upgrade) and the new Muse application.

Same here – if Jetbrains insists on switching to a subscription-only licensing model that makes my tools STOP WORKING if I don’t pay the subscription fees anymore – I’m going back to CodeRush for sure!

The service model doesn’t suit everyone, especially the loyal customers. This problem rose gradually over the time. First sign of the service model emerged when JetBrains decided to force the start date of the perpetual upgrade at the moment when previous license has expired. That simply means – you cannot step aside and wait 6 months for the next, improved version worth buying, because when you renew your license then you will have only 6 months before it expires again!!

Now, JetBrains went one step ahead – they force you to switch to even worst license model – by forcing you not only to pay annually, but also blackmail you to stop your editor working once you refuse paying for features that you are not willing to buy.

The only reasonable license model: one year support and then keep your editor for life. Once you decide to upgrade – the upgrade starts from the day you renew the license. Sure, you can’t wait forever to upgrade, but I think – one year chance to reconsider the upgrade is a fair.

Regarding the service model – I don’t think that having this model separately to the perpetual model is a bad thing. Actually I think this model actually can be useful too. But let’s be fair – most of your customers are supposed to be loyal and using your software for years, not for 2 months where this service model could pay off for its low cost entry.

I have been a IDEA user for a few years now and I usually update every year my personal license. This said, I really don’t like this new model because:
1) as already mentioned in other comments, it effectively means I am “renting” my IDE, and that is simply not acceptable. I need to know that, if I want, I can skip a version without losing my IDE altogether and your solution simply does not work.
2) it becomes a lot more complicated

Point 2) should be especially important for Jetbrains as a company: if subscriptions are a deal-breakers for companies, you lose a huge user-pool, as well as all those people that started using your software because they were what they used at work.

I really hope you reconsider your model but, given that I imagine you won’t, I will start looking at alternatives too…it’s been a while since I looked to Eclipse and Sublime anyways.

I have been a IDEA user for a few years now and I usually update every year my personal license. This said, I really don’t like this new model because:
1) as already mentioned in other comments, it effectively means I am “renting” my IDE, and that is simply not acceptable. I need to know that, if I want, I can skip a version without losing my IDE altogether and your solution simply does not work.
2) it becomes a lot more complicated to convince/convert companies to use Jetbrains software. Bigger companies will not mind a big expense, if it is a one-off that can be used for as long as they want, but convincing them to lock themselves into a subscription model is a lot harder. I know for a fact that my current company would not be using IntelliJ right now if this model was used when they converted.

Point 2) should be especially important for Jetbrains as a company: if subscriptions are a deal-breakers for companies, you lose a huge user-pool, as well as all those people that started using your software because they were what they used at work.

I really hope you reconsider your model but, given that I imagine you won’t, I will start looking at alternatives too…it’s been a while since I looked to Eclipse and Sublime anyways.

I just convinced my company to buy a handful of PyCharm licenses. This puts me in a slightly embarrassing position to have to let everyone know that the licensing model has changed significantly.

And no, this is in no way good for existing customers. I have a personal license, for example, and will go from paying $49/yr if I want updates to paying $49/yr if I even want to continue using the software. You really can’t spin that – developers aren’t going to be confused by marketing doublespeak. We’re not stupid – we work with math for a living.

I have several products from Jetbrains (webstorm, phpstorm, pycharm) and only use 1 product primary at work (webstorm, FE dev here), phpstorm occasionally(drupal theming), and pycharm for fun off the work (django, flask etc).

While I prefer current model for product that I use primarily (since I will update once my yearly subscription is over for sure if there’s important update, but keep using current version if new feature is not necessary), but I do prefer monthly subscription model for something that I use occasionally and on and off here and there (I bought pycharm, but haven’t updated yet), and only subscribe to it again when I want / neeed to use it .

So I’d like to have an option for both product purchase + updates and monthly based subscription

The problem I have with this new subscription idea is this: source code lasts for a long, long time, and if in 2 or 3 years time, or longer, I decide to resurrect an old project, I find my source code still there, but my IDE is dead because I haven’t renewed it.

I’ve never experienced that before, but that’s the scenario you’re going to push onto us.

For images, this is probably fine with Adobe’s SAAS, but this isn’t an image, this is source code that can live for years and require the toolset from that era to work with it.

It’s quite simple – continue with the current licensing, AND offer the new one. That’s it.

I am a supporter of your new licensing model. I use several of your tools, but due to the previous pricing, didn’t always upgrade all the tools. The “All Products” plan and special pricing for existing users of $149/year is an _incredible_ value. It will allow me to update all my tools to the latest versions and use more of your products.

I just hope that if you try to accommodate the perpetual license users, you don’t end up having to increase the new pricing structure in order to make your business model work.

I also suggest that you offer a grace period on the special pricing renewals. You can even make this retroactive to keep your business model intact. I think this will help for people who are afraid of losing this special pricing discount, either by forgetting to renew or just not having the money at the time of renewal. I think even offering up to a 6 month grace period on a 1 year renewal would be another generous offer by JetBrains.

I’ve been long-time eclipse user and there was a time I could swear I would never switch from it (except for vim + python). When I found IDEA I give it a shot and in a couple of days I gladly paid for it, and been so doing happily since then. I really don’t need it this bad, but I like it, this is where my working habits feel at home, and it’s been the only non-open-source product on my machine I use by my choice, but if the new subscription model becomes real, we will have to part our ways, searching for a new home. Not a big deal, IDEA will still be the best IDE for java in the next couple of years, but there is no chance to switch back after this slap.

As a small shop with 1 full time developer, that works a lot of C++ and C# front facing GUI . I vehemently dislike this subscription model. I brought this to the attention of my Engineering Supervisor, and to the attention of the Network Admin who is a consultant and both agree that this phone home scenario will not work.
All network activity is monitored, we have separate computers that access the internet because the managers are so afraid of hackers, and industrial spies and Microsoft spying on the network that all development servers, and stations are NEVER allowed to access the internet. So any development machine on which the JetBrains tools sits will NEVER be allowed to phone home.
If you insist on going forward with this subscription model then our position will be either get new tool, of stay with the current tool reSharper and never upgrade.
Your choice affects us, and while this shop only has 1 license and as a result is miniscule in your money stream. This is a VERY BIG DEAL for us.

Wait, now I understand.
This is genius.
This whole thing is a SEO campaign.
Today or tomorrow Jetbrains will tell us something along the lines “We hear you and we will offer a perpetual licence (which will be more expensive of course.)
At the end they sold us a price hike as “listening to our customers” AND they did get thousands additional backlinks for free.

The only thing at fault here is the taking away of possibility of “at your pace” upgrades. If you offer the subscription model alongside the existing model, I don’t see anyone complaining. That way you REALLY help developers who need it to make use of it (which was the rhetoric used in the original announcement).

What I found problematic is the way your original announcement was worded, as if doing us a favour in imposing higher prices for the same product. Your core users are software developers, not magic beans buyers. “Yeah, it might seem I’m slapping your face, but what I’m actually doing is helping you with your face blood flow.”

You should know better than this. Here’s hoping this gets resolved somehow and you continue making (fairly licenced) awesome products.

I have no interest in dealing with a subscription model. Like many developers, I have different projects that require different tools (i.e. RStudio for R, IntelliJ for Java, etc) — so I may not use a application for some time — but still need it for limited use. A subscription model assumes that it’s the only application you ever use. Its like the marketing people have suddenly taken over JetBrains and not realized the culture of the tech community. We move elsewhere if we aren’t happy, it happens fast, and you can’t fix it afterwards.

Might as well add my voice voice – I abhor subscription based software licensing that disables the software unless you’re actively paying. It took me several months after my last yearly renewal for Resharper expired before I could afford the upgrade, which was fine as I could use the older version quite happily. In this new model, I’d lose access to the software the minute it expired, so no doubt I would immediately move to alternative such as CodeMaid or some of the newer Roslyn based extensions to detect code errors – I don’t use a huge amount of Resharper’s functionality so I’m fairly sure (in my case at least) I can seek solutions elsewhere. And if that happened then you’d loose me as a customer. Of course, loosing my custom isn’t going to break the bank, but given the comments I’m not the only one who would “vote with my wallet”.

Sadly it seems to be the way licensing in general is going, but as long as I can hold out and stick it to the man, I will. Newer is not always better!

Most of us use only one IDE, so why did you create a subscription-based model focued on satisfying customers who purchase multiple IDEs? Jetbrains, at least stop pretending that this change is FOR US since this is an obvious lie. I think that our comments are the proof of that…

2) A subscription-based model where you eliminate EAP, and instead, subscribers get new features IMMEDIATELY rather than having to wait for 8-12 months for the next major version. This is what Adobe CC does. As soon as there’s a new feature in Photoshop, boom, I’ve got it. This way, you encourage people who want to be on the cutting edge to subscribe, without forcing them to do so.

Ever since the first EAP of PhpStorm (it was still called WebIDE back then), I’m totally in love with your products. When explaining to other people why, I’m usually explaining it with “It’s like the iPhone of IDEs: So much polish, so many small things that are exactly right”.

Conversely, ever since I could pay for PhpStorm, I’m paying every year for the updates. Not just because I want the latest and greatest features (aside of updated language support, there’s not that much I need), but also to support you people.

Over time, I’ve added licenses for IntelliJ, ReSharper, AppCode and 0xDBE will probably happen too at some point. Yes. I know that IntelliJ can do what PhpStorm does, but the self-contained, usage-optimized nature of the smaller IDEs is still worth it, especially at the low price they’re at.

IntelliJ and AppCode I too pay for every year. ReSharper I don’t need any more, so I’m not keeping that subscription up to date.

Looking at what I’m currently paying for, I really like the idea of the new all-products subscription: It costs me less and I don’t have to renew various support contracts (which is what the extensions currently are) at different times, so that’s nice.

However.

Right now I know that if worse comes to worst – if I somehow need to work for a prolonged time without internet access or if I am at some point in the position of not being able to pay for the support contracts any more, then I still have the safety net that the stuff that is on my machine right now, I will be able to use no matter what.

By turning this into a subscription, you’re taking this safety net away from me.

Even excluding horror scenarios: Right now I can take my Laptop which I use very rarely, take it on vacation where I have no or only really expensive internet and I can be sure that the version of IntelliJ I have installed on that Laptop is going to be there for me. No need to remember to have it phone home before I go, no checking for subscription status – nothing.

This convenience is very important for me and I would be willing to pay extra for this.

For some people – probably many corporate users, this doesn’t matter much, but for me this is really important and this is why going subscription only actually bummed me out quite a bit.

If you can find a way to guarantee your fixed income while still providing us users with a safety net, even at a premium price, I would really appreciate that.

I agree with our sentiments. I often take advantage of my FT Employment, that’s remote; and when travelling in Bhutan, Tibet, etc; I will go 2-3 months without Internet access (We are on a quarterly schedule, and giant corporation means all the details and timelines are meticulously spelt out well in advance [as anti Agile as you can get XD] but means I can travel for 2 months, work intermittently on items with appropriate deadlines, and return to civilization, check in code, and be ready to plan next trip. This subscription model will break that freedom if the software is locked out.

Personally I like the idea of a toolbox subscription. I allready paid for two JetBrains product and I’m going to buy a license for 0XDBE when it’s available. But I have to say, the CTO in our company would never buy a SaaS subscription and we have to move. So hopefully you find a way for both models. Greetings!

I’ve been using IntelliJ for the past 3 years, and it’s amazing product.
That said, I don’t agree with the subscription thing…I think it sucks.
But at least I’m not alone, been reading a lot of comments and responses and it shows most of your users agree that it’s a bad move.
Please reconsider our opinions, we’ve been loyal users, it is only reasonable to expect of you to be loyal to us.
Regards.

Jetbrains, I will suggest you fire the person who came with “Subscription ONLY” idea. That was the most “unintelligent idea” I’ve ever seen from you. Come on! You don’t want to look like mercenaries, like Adobe did!

Just give possibility to keep last version of software if subscription was a year long, making it essentially similar to perpetual licence model.
And prices, they are now considerably higher for new users then it was before. Please make annual subscription prices at the same level as renewal price was, keeping monthly prices as announced.

A subscription is a liability, a perpetual license is an asset. It is much easier to sell an asset to management than a liability. I’m not saying my organization won’t continue to be a customer if the license isn’t perpetual. But it makes it harder.

It is an asset in the sense that there is only a deprecation cost (working on the assumption that at some point you will update and buy a new license), and after whatever deprecation period you set, there is no longer any impact on a balance sheet from having the license and using the product.

Compare that to a subscription where, for as long as you want to use the product, there is a fixed monthly or annual outgoing amount. As such, it’s a liability on a balance sheet that won’t go away.

For my employer, I’m sure the subscription model is great. It’s similar to MSDN, and it’s nice to be able to use whatever IDE I need for my work.

But for my personal licenses, please allow me to buy perpetual licenses. I have upgrade / renewed my license in the past because the feature differences between IDEA 13 and 14 were compelling enough to me to warrant an upgrade. And that’s the key point — the product was good enough that I wanted to upgrade/ renew my license.

So long JetBrains, it was good while it lasted. At least VS2015 does a decent job (not anywhere as good as R#) but we’ll have to just get used to it. Hope some other company with better vision comes up with a replacement.

Unfortunately, a pure subscription model won’t work for me either. I require the ability to use the software completely disconnected–our development network is not connected to the Internet at all, and will never be. So having the software ping home is simply a no-go. On top of that, the perception that I’m being nickel and dimed is hard to get over. I realize that many businesses enjoy the stability of a single fixed price, but I don’t use your software nearly enough to warrant constantly paying for it. I was really looking forward to using IntelliJ, CLion, and friends more.

So *are* you actually listening? Because that would mean reversing your decision.

Look, you’re blowing smoke up our asses because you think it’s necessary to placate us into accepting the new model.

> easier access to your coding tools

Bullshit. It’s not difficult to access the working copy of IDEA I already own. It’s not difficult to buy a new version either.

> more control and flexibility

Bullshit. What control would this increase, besides yours over our wallets?

In the vast majority of cases, the only people who (think they) benefit from the new “flexibility” of subscribing to the whole toolbox are the ones who haven’t figured out they can just pay for IDEA and use whatever language plugins they need.. unless, of course, you’ll greedily remove that possibility next, to “close the loophole”.

> At JetBrains we believe that software developers are some of the most forward-thinking people in the world.

Blah-blah.. Two paragraphs of kissing our asses to make fleecing us more palatable.

>> @jetbrains hey, would you consider a subscription price for multiple tools? Being a polyglot developer is expensive

–We all know it’s only expensive if you don’t use IDEA and plugins for the languages you need.. but of course you’d put up that tweet to project the impression that lots of people *want* to rent their tools, which is clearly not true (even judging by this thread).

>> @jetbrains making products free for students is an awesome move. Now we just need a subscription plan for all the IDEs.

Who’s “we” and *why* do we need a subscription plan for all IDEs? How is that related to products being free for students?

In reality, the reason why you’re able to even *attempt* pushing this new rental model down our throats is because your IDEs are simply the best on the market – by a wide margin – and people who don’t mind paying for quality software to help them be more productive would have a hard time switching to anything else.

That’s it. If that weren’t the case, you’d never even dream of doing this. So *are* you listening?

The two problems with your current model are:

1) People pay for a year, but get a year minus whatever time had passed since they last gave money to you. This is bullshit. *”No, we’ll only give you the wheels of a Ford Fiesta, because you were supposed to buy a new one 11 months ago! Fuck you.”*

2) The increased price punishment for failing to give you more money sooner.

Your current model was all about trying to force people into giving you a steady stream of income per sucker already.

Now, in your greed, you’re just taking that all the way to a full rental model.

Look, people don’t want to rent the tools that are installed on their own computers. Now that your customers have made that clear, the right thing to do – were you actually listening – would be to return to the *original* licensing model where people paid for whatever major versions they wanted.

The current model was, after all, just meant to take your customers towards the rental model, without them quite noticing.

Well now they’ve noticed, and spoken. Act accordingly, or prove that you were not actually listening and that this was just a PR-stunt to placate us.

I for one am all for the subscription model, and it simplifies my life, and tool chain greatly.

I primarily use PHPStorm, and will use RubyMine, and CLion, Resharper, and PyCharm as required. As much as Idea is a good platform, and language plugins are available — they aren’t designed around the specific language, and I’ve went back to the tuned products, which yield a significant productivity boost.

Having a subscription for all products is -much- better, and I am going to be able to explore and use more software in a realistic setting over months throughout a product lifespan, rather than just trying to make do with a 30 day trial. In addition, it means I will always have the newest version with newest language/toolchain support as well.

The subscription for PHPStorm will be $2/wk. Which is still ridiculously cheap, and anyone who has any skill should be able to afford a year with a single short term contract. I will personally shell out the $6/wk for the full toolbox suite, because I will haphazardly use different supporting language throughout the year; and I can live with the equivalent of one less latte a week.

But then, that is what I personally saw when I basically told many clients to drop the US market entirely, as they provide much resistance to paying for their tools, that simply doesn’t exist in most of the world. The services range in price from USD 10 to USD 100 per month, and every step of the way, only the US market was complaining about subscriptions, price-hikes, and the like. While most of Europe, Korea/Japan, and South America had no strong feeling, and are still increasing in revenue. And after dropping the US market entirely from support and service, in one case, 95% of the negative comments, internet fires, and PR-mitigation required vanished entirely.

This is true to such an extent, I have personally had several companies based out of the SF Metro Area, to cease their free-services/premium prices, and switch to a pay-model, and cut out all US support. Needless to say, they were hesitant at first, but after a few months, the resulting financials convinced them.

I am in all my future contracts, always making this suggestion for any Internet based company to dramatically increase revenue. Ditch the US market, who are trained to have things for free; and focus on the rest of the world, that are willing to pay a livable and reasonable amount for goods and services.

It’s hard to believe that Americans can be so poor, and underpaid, and have to resort to badgering others to do work for free.

I personally know many people (I am not sure what your definition of “a lot” is; but I personally know around 20 developers who are in support of the subscription model, 40 who don’t care either way, and maybe 2 who is staunchly against it.). So, — yes, the majority in my world-view, are in support, or at worst, apathetic on the matter.

To me it also seems as if most of the vitriol seem to be coming from people located in the USA. Are developers there so underpaid that people can’t easily afford to pay what is effectively a trivial amount for their tools; and to support the company that is developing and constantly improving on them?

Most of us have been around long enough to have watched companies go down financially, or get greedy and massively raise the price, or get bought out, or phase out a product. Under the pay and then pay for support/update provides protection. Pay and use. Pay every year and get latest + support. If Jetbrains pulls something stupid I can choose to keep what I have, just no updates and/or support.

Under the subscription model you are screwed. After 30 days your IDE goes bye-bye. Other than people demonstrating that it is a price increase which it is. All I see is concerns about the risk and anger over choice to get off treadmill when it suits them.

I would bet most the differences of opinion are younger and/or less exp. devs vs. us old farts who have seen this sort of stuff happen.

People are happy to pay for quality tools, as evidenced by JetBrains’ success until now.

But people are not happy to *rent* those tools, as evidenced by the vast majority of commenters in this thread. Your 20/40/2 stats look highly suspicious.

You personally might be happy with renting your IDE, but what about your operating system, for example? You’d probably draw the line somewhere, and I bet it would be for the same main reasons lots of people draw the line at IDEs.

How hard would it be to introduce the subscription model for folks that want that type of pay by use software model and for folks that want to utilize your entire line of products for a lower cost, but retain the licensing model?

The two can be overlapping somewhat – you can pay for the subscription model, but if you want to outright ‘own’ a release going forward, then that specific software has to have a license bought for it. I’m not an expert but you’d probably stand to make more money that way. People get to try out your entire line for as long as they’d want to pay under the subscription line, those that don’t want to outright own the software forever because they don’t need it that long can continue on the subscription model, while those that decide they want to stick with a specific software for the foreseeable future can buy the license for that one.

I’m now a customer of your products for more than 6 years. I’m a happy customer, I happily pay your reasonable price for the productivity gains I receive from your products. However, making your products time bombs is a bad idea for the following reason:

Whenever I complete a project I take an exact virtual snapshot of the development and build environment and archive it. This is not only for documentation purposes, no, but for late debugging. It has already happened several times that e.g. 3 years later I get a call because a serious problem has been found with the software and needs to be fixed. Well, no problem, I fire up the VM and find myself exactly as I left the project, I can debug the fix, press a key to buils it again and ship it. Of course, in the VM there is also my IDE from Jetbrains.

If Jetbrains products expire then I have a problem. “Sometime later” my workspace will have an expired IDE and it is a liability whether I can get a new, compatible license key (in time) or not.

Therefor, with your new model I will not use your products for new projects anymore, I want a perpetual license in my archive.

I’ve noticed that a number of commentators have complained that the IDEs are now carrying loads of show-stopping bugs, many of which have been there for several releases. Meanwhile, the company is adding more features on top of bugs that really need looking at.
And there’s the problem. Jetbrains doesn’t have the resources to fix the bugs and implement new features. So what do they do? They prioritise building out the feature set because we – the customers – won’t upgrade otherwise. How many people here have said that they skip a few revisions until a feature comes along that they need? One of the main reasons that folk are against the subscription model because it will rob them of the ability to skip versions.
Anyway, what this means is that features get added, and bugs get fixed when they have time. What’s worse is that if a new feature has bugs, it probably won’t get fixed if it takes time away from adding a feature that will ensure people upgrade.
The subscription model will allow them to focus on bug-fixing. This is vital, so one way or another, the subscription model is here to stay, even if they bring some sort of perpetual licence as well.

But the phone-home thing is a non-starter in my opinion. Here’s a few suggestions:

1/. Just go with the yearly subscription. Not sure why you need the monthly one.

2/. When a subscription is purchased, just download a file that gets checked locally when the IDE starts up. Pretty much the same as you have now. If the subscription expires, then just flash up a dialog box every 15 minutes. There is no need to stop folk from working. I know this means trusting your customers, but we’re also trusting you to deliver solid software with an improving feature set during the subscription year. Trust runs both ways.

3/. Restore the perpetual licence.

Someone already suggested only allowing EAPs to run through the subscription. This is a brilliant idea. You have to be a subscriber to get the latest and greatest as soon as it’s ready. Perpetual licence holders have to wait until the next version is released.
There are probably loads of other incentives you can offer subscribers. As well as the extra tools and IDEs, they could have preferential support. After a year, you get a mug, the year after, you get a t-shirt. (Okay, I’m just throwing stuff out there now).

I like the monthly subscription better than the yearly because I can think of several cases where I’ve worked on a project in a particular language for a couple months and then shelved it or finished it and not had to use that language again for a while, or at least not to the point where I need the full IDE. It may not make sense for people who’s job is to be a “Java Developer” or “C++ Developer” but I write in several languages at different times and I’d prefer to not have to drop $100 on an IDE that I’ll use for 2 months and then shelve.

I think the proposed changes are reasonable for commercial licenses for organizations and companies. However I feel that offering the perpetual licensing option to individual developers might be a better option and even benefit jetbrains in the long run as it will broaden the user base and and create a larger pool of developers who might at some point advocate for purchasing commercial licenses once they join a company.

I’ve seen this suggestion in a couple places and I honestly think it’s the best compromise.

After 12 months (or even 18 or 24 months) of continuous subscription, you get a perpetual license to the license at the end of those 12 months. If you want future releases, you will need to subscribe for 12 more months. I can see the concern on Jetbrains end that 12 months would be no different than the current model, so I think 18 or 24 month subscription to perpetual would be good alternatives too.

It addresses the fact that developers want some assurance that their tools will be there, while also assuring Jetbrains can continue to support their products and cash flow.

Personally, I don’t have much of a problem paying more regularly, but if for some reason I do not want to pay for the product for a short time, I do not want to lose it entirely.

Subscription based pricing is such a bad idea. Particulatly so for Jetbrains. Most recent releases of IntilliJ have been backward steps providing features that I am not interested in. So I want to choose if and when to upgrade and I want to try out the new version before committing. If it’s good and offers a clear benefit over my current version then I’ll happy pay good money to upgrade. But don’t try to tie me in to unwanted upgrades just to keep yourselves in a job.

The new model costs less than the amount I pay for IntelliJ, WebStorm and CLion separately each year, and being able to pay monthly is better for me (an individual developer). I understand why people are angry that whichever particular tool out of the group that they use now costs comparatively more and I think you guys should allow people to buy the old licenses too but please don’t abandon this new pricing model due to everyone freaking out because it legitimately will save me $100+ a year

From my POV this is just a minor price increase. Even with existing licensing model I have been paying every year for new version. Yeah, new price (in my case ultimate only) will be higher, but not a big deal.

My problem is how this new model will be implemented technically. How exactly they are going to check if I can use idea or not? Does it require to be online to use they tools? If so – not good. In some cases I can work in environments without (or with very restricted) internet access.

Another thing – pls consider to allow the same lic/subscription to run on N (at least 2) machines at the same time. Switching between multiple workstations and starting idea every time is a pain, especially for big projects where loading/indexing takes very long.

Personally I’m totally OK with subscription model, and in fact you already had some kind of it but let’s say better… more friendly? I think that almost everyone bought upgrades and was ok with that, but when it comes to mind that if newer versions won’t be worth price you have to still pay for it, it’s not something that makes me happy. And subscription model should be A LOT cheaper than actual model, like adobe did – CC is not really pricey, it’s affordable for almost everyone who makes money using their soft. But now we have situation that worse model (maybe not bad, just worse than previous) is far more expensive… For now I had opensource license, and was about to buy personal for commercial work, for me it’s not a big problem because I will be treated as existing user, but for new customers it will be more expensive (first big price + half of it for next years vs 80% of price forever, I will have paid more after just two years!!!), you should definitely rethink model or prices, because none of them are better in new model.

With Jetbrains subscription model i have few problems, and that’s why i’m with those who do not like it (disclaimer: i have always upgraded my phpstorm version for last 5 years and i have no problem spending 49€+VAT each year for it). Problems:
1) For new users it’s price increase. Now renew for year is 49€+VAT, for new users each year will cost 99€+VAT. That’s 2x increase. Which is huge increase (old users can lock in 49€ – so they are not affected that much, but new users are);
2) if i convert to subscriptions i loose my current license which i would like to keep as backup; I.e. – even if i convert to subscriptions I would still like to have keep whatever version of phpStorm will be actual in next year September (i have free updates until then). So that after 3 years if i decide to stop paying for subscriptions i could return to my 3 years old phpStorm.

So it’s not subscriptions that i have most objections about, but 2x price increase and giving up my current license which i would like to keep as backup.

Lower risk, seriously?
You save a few nickels in the first month and therefore you risk to have a project without working development environment in a few years. Porting your project to another IDE in a few years will cost you multiples of what you could save with the subscription model.

I doubt I will buy from your company again. I have purchased several licenses for myself. But I don’t see that continuing. I haven’t upgraded my ReSharper because you removed the single language option and I will not gain anything from the multiple language price increase. And since I didn’t buy the upgrade at its current cost what would make you think charging an annual cost very close to the first would entice me?

Your blog was probably right about the way we produce software not changing. But evidently your model of trying to extract money has. I had tried other products before and will quite simply move when ready to upgrade to the latest bells and whistles. If you want to ensure we upgrade give us a compelling reason to (outside the license structure forcing it on us). As a note, a big issue to me is that the last upgrade I bought was a terrible experience. I ended up using an older version until you had fixed it.

I could see a subscription model for bulk-licensing and continuing the original payment model for individual developers. You still get more money from those who can pay it, but individual developers still get the access they rely on without having to sign up for a yearly subscription they might not be able to pay. I love your software, but forcing me to pay every year just for access will probably push me to other solutions.

Exactly this. Give us the choice. I completely understand the decision to lower the entry price point for people who don’t currently use IntelliJ. I’m also sure that a large part of this pricing model is based around the dependable MRR (monthly recurring revenue). However, why not offer the best of both worlds? Let those who want to continue paying yearly (and as has been described, paying more money possibly) do so and also offer a subscription model for those that choose to go the subscription route.

The last thing any company wants to do is make a decision that polarizes its user base. Don’t split your user base full of mostly promoters into a user base that has a lot of detractors. We all know the value of NPI (net promoter index) and a move like this has a lot of potential to damage that score in a potentially irrecoverable way.

For what it’s worth, I’m in the process of trying to get my company of 30 developers to switch over to IntelliJ from Eclipse, and this upcoming change is enough to halt that. In fact, it’s quite amazing to me how many people I’ve heard over the past 2 days talking about this and how much it upsets them. The negative publicity attached to this move is probably larger than you anticipated.

I’m glad that you say you’re listening – I’m eager on behalf of myself and the company that I work for to hear what the result is. I’m looking forward to continuing to have a choice in how I choose to use your products.

Perfectly said. Please give us a choice. I personally own licence and keep renewing for last four years and I am asking my collegues to use Intelij and asking my company provide licence for people. But with new subscription model its not going to work out for me either and for my company also. Please provide us both options or atleast continue to provide Perpetual licence model for individuals like us.
“Develop with Pleasure”, not any More after new licensing Policy. You turned happy customer to Unhappy Customer

Yes, I’m guessing that piracy must be becoming a real problem. I’m actually surprised that folk who make a living from software would think its okay to rip off other people who make a living from software.

What the company has to do is leave the perpetual model in place, but make the subscription model much better value.

I am really happy with my current personal license, I pay renewal each year regularly and I am able to do work for different contracts with the same tool I learned and love. Your change of plans in terms of licensing and especially the so called ‘killswitch’ option will make me reconsider that and start transitioning to other tools. It really pains me to do so, as I have been really productive using your tools and it will be hard to find replacements, for now. Please keep it as it is, the outrage is really strong on HN and Reddit already!

To understand the need for a subscription you need to know the financial position of the company (Jetbrains) and the number of paid upgrades. Each year, to introduce something that will buy – it is impossible, it is true. A free work too, no one wants, which is understandable. Adobe just is not afraid to say it openly. You (Jetbrains) must understand that there is no right or wrong decision, once you come to this – so there is good reason, there is no point looking back, it means the current situation is not favorable to you. Do not hesitate to say it

The perpetual model – on its own – is no longer viable. It prevents the company from fixing bugs and encourages them to load the IDEs with crud that no one needs to get people to upgrade. I imagine the number of upgrades has fallen over the past few years because the tools already have everything most people need. Now if someone could come up with an idea on how the company can survive without upgrades then now’s the time to speak.

It is quite simple. Most of the IDEs are based on languages and APIs that are constantly upgraded. Supporting Jave 8, or PHP 5.6 or whatever.

I and most other’s here have no objections with offering the subscription as an option, but forcing it will likely reduces sales. I know I won’t be upgrading PHPStorm. PyCharms and RubyMine I’ll have to consider.

Gentelmens, I have a couple of questions: I have a personal Pycharm license that I update as existing customer using a discount (59$ instead of 99$). But it is possible to use old version without upgrades and without payment. Is my understanding correct, that this new model will not be actual anymore and if I stop to pay for updates I’ll loose an option to use an existing copy? Also is it correct, that if now I pay 59$/year with new subscription model I’ll need to pay 99$ (after all transitions/discounts pass)? Thanks.

I am the customer for ten or so years. Paid times more for the first licenses (even not taking inflation into account). It is not a problem for me to pay more for such a great product (but actually I pay less due to -2 years upgrade strategy). I also have some services on subscription, so I know this can work quite well.
If new license model become reality I will try to switch to some other products. Developers do that all the time. Regardless if I succeed or not I will not anymore encourage and help people to use Jetbrains products. Instead I will do just the opposite. I had success in promoting before and I think I still have good chances now. If licensing will not become reality I will stop advocating anyway – this intention to f*ck us can not be ignored even if source was once the best friends to developers.
There were many reasons in the comments I agree with and some I don’t – no need to double them. Plus for every reason there is a counter-argument and it is hard to keep a discussion in comments too. But I am wondering – why the hell nobody asked developers in Jetbrains would they be happy with such a model if their licenses were not paid by company? I am pretty sure developes would say the same things as community did here, in a thread.

11 years of a happy Intellij IDEA user… but I have to say, I’m not conviced about this model. Throughout history I have jumped (or not) to a latest version. I’m happy about the choice I have : either leave it like that and wait for a new killing feature to buy an upgrade license, or jump to the latest/greatest version.

Just leave me my choices, and I’ll keep on being a happy Intellij IDEA user.

For what it’s worth, I’m on board with the subscription plan. I already considered it something of a subscription, buying the latest version every year, and I’m not terribly concerned about losing the old version of the software — it’s not like I ever look back on IDEA 13. The upside is I can try any of the other tools out without commiting so much money — and I like them, I can upgrade to the all-tools access.

As an individual developer using PyCharm everyday I don’t care for the new plan or pricing. I also don’t like the fact I can no longer extend my current license beyond Sept. 2016 to delay the inevitable… I’d rather buy another upgrade license at $59 to push my current license to 2017 than switch to a plan that punishes (financially more) developers who only use one product, like PyCharm.

So, you’re against paying USD $2.50/wk for PyCharm? ($2.50 arrived at given undiscounted rates of 9.90/mo; 99.00/yr, using the month option)
To me, that’s still remarkably underpriced for the amount of income, and productivity the IDE generates me.

It seems that most of the vitriol seems to coming from Americans. Are indie developers paid so little that one cannot afford to pay normal rates for software and tools? Indeed the rates for USD are cheaper — 9.90USD vs 14 EUR they advertise. So they are already making a concession for the apparently underpaid people of the USA.

And with the indefinite renewal price of USD 49 / yr for existing customers (unless one lapses in payment) basically means you’re paying less than $1/week to use a great tool. Not terribly certain where the vitriol over such a pricing model comes from.

I think most of us find the new pricing to be pretty fair- I know I’m excited about it.

What I’m not excited about is not having a perpetual license for _any_ version of the software, even after paying for it for years. What I’m not excited about is being locked into a subscription service where they can raise the price at any time for any reason, and my options are either to pay it, or lose access to all the versions I’ve already paid for.

Most of us aren’t excited about the _model_. Most seem to find the pricing to be decent, especially with the current owner discount.

I despise subscriptions models for perpetual or once paid software that can perform its purpose for years without me benefiting from an update. A CD burning or a simple photo editing tool might be the best examples.

Looking at my IntelliJ IDEA it’s a matter of the project and programming language.
Writing a classic java desktop app. I might be good for years with my current license.

PhpStorm: working with existing projects and frameworks I might live skipping some annual upgrade.

So switching to a subscription my upgrade the prices would keep stable when choosing a yearly subscription.
But I would lose my licenses.

And if I decide to skip a yearly subscription I end up with a much higher monthly/yearly rate.

To clearify: I am quite happy with the software. I have no problem paying for it – even if JetBrains raised the price.

It’s just the thing that the license won’t be perpetual anymore. That bothers me. I think that many your now upset customers see it the same. If you could consider an option that the software will not expire when the subscription runs out, I would be happy to pay extra for that.

For me (who earns income from coding) the cost differences of 20-50 of $ (or pounds or euros or whatever) per year is not that really relevant. The tool (IntelliJ + PyCharm + WebStorm plugins) is good enough (compared to Sublime or Eclipse) to justify the cost.

What pisses me off about the new licensing is that the tool may disappear from me within a month for no fault of my own. Even if I prepay for a early subscription, if phone-home server is gone (JetBrains goes bust / gets sold and new company does not like the model any more), I will loose the tool.

My IT engagements span months. I usually recommend same tools for others on the same project. The “it may disappear on you” nature of the 30-day-phone-home (not because I would stop paying) is a serious deal breaker.

The fact that the current prices are listed “promotional until Jan 2016” and no future “normal” prices visible anywhere aggravates the problem.

You are turning a reliable, recommendable workhorse of IT industry into a fly-by-night unicorn.

Previous licensing plan required no convincing. It provided complete certainty of the future. This one is crap (even with all the sweetening you threw in for the present license holders)

the subscription model is really bad news! I really *love* your software, but a subscription model will make me (and the company I work for) go back to Eclipse where we came from.
The reasons:

– I use WebStorm for personal projects. Projects I don’t even earn money with. Projects I touch from time to time, maybe 4 times a year. A subscription is too expensive for my personal projects. Maybe I should mention that we decided to use IntelliJ IDEA in the company *after* I had a couple of great months working on personal projects. I know that some of my colleagues have personal licenses for education and “playing around”. I guess they will have the same problem with the subscription.
– for my company a subscription model is no option! We have to bee free in the decision when we invest money for upgrades.

Please keep in mind that most other subscription services offer more than just software you download. Atlassian Cloud for example. In that case a subscription model is ok since the offering includes hosting, backup, maintenance! It’s more than just a piece of software that we run on our own devices.
Same with services like Evernote, Dropbox etc. And even Office365 is different since Exchange and some other services run in the cloud and Microsoft takes care of hosting, backups, security etc. !

That’s a major difference to your plans. You want to have a subscription fee for software that every user runs on his local machine! Storage, backup, repository are still our responsibility. Your new model offers no extra service that I or my company is willing to pay for.

I’m really disappointed and sad! Sad because I really love your products! Sad that we have to migrate back to Eclipse or NetBeans if we want to stay up to date and avoid the subscription.
Disappointed because I always had the feeling that JetBrains is somehow “better” than some of the “big ones”.

I’m not always connected to the web and I’m not liking the idea of using a subscription model that has to ping to jet brains server before allowing me to use the IDE. Nothing irritates me more than getting kicked from using software because I have no access to the internet.

I like the idea of subscription model for more but when subscription ends, I want to still have what I paid for and just not get any more updates.

It keeps incentive that i’m paying for the upgrades and not for a service. People do not like to pay for services, when they can go elsewhere to pay for a product.

Make subscription model similar to what we have now with access to IDE when subscription is over but no updates.

People will keep updating the subscription, even if the updates are bug fixes + improvements and not just major features if they have the money.
Instead of kicking your faithful community out of the ecosystem, if they’re low on funds or disagree with the updates when renewal time comes around.

In my humble opinion:
1. The subscription idea is awesome.
2. Subscription plans should be much more cheaper, which will bring you more new users, even “weekend programmers” and let them face the “full power of the BrainsStar” ;-). Yes, some of them will try-and-leave, but others my like your great IDEs and stay we JetBrains forever.
3. Standard licences should stay. If you think WebStorm was underpriced, it should go up in current licence model. All people satisfied with perpetual model will stay happy that way.
4. From my own perspective: you should do something with EUR prices because they are bigger then USD prices especially if you add VAT.

I’m a very happy costumer with my Intellig Idea Ultimate license and really don’t liked the subscription without the possibilitie to be the owner of a tool after some fidelity time or buy the tool alone with a período of updates.

If the company don’t provide a perpetual license option after 2 november I’m changing the IDE as many angry costumers.

The company has the best IDE now, but seens to be loosing costumers with THIS change. I hope you listen us.

As others have pointed out, having a product you’ve paid for stop working is a disgusting proposition. As much as I love your products and all the new features that come with each release, I can’t always justify the upgrade and continue to use my old version for a while. A subscription model would likely increase my costs, as well as take away any rights I have to continue using it after ending my payments.

Perhaps a dual system would be a good idea? Continue with the old licensing scheme, but also allow a subscription?

Additionally, as someone without a fixed monthly income, increasing my base monthly payments is not something I want to do. I’d rather take the hit when times are good and be safe in the knowledge that I’m not losing anything I already have when times are less good.

Just my two cents, you’ve got a great IDE in PHPStorm. It’s worth more money than you charge. Even so, I won’t do the subscription thing, period, until my perpetual license intellisense doesn’t work (PHP 8?) and I have no other options. In that same light, I love Photoshop and Lightroom. I upgraded Lightroom 3 years in a row before they switched to the subscription model, but now that it’s subscription only, I’m going to use the last non-subscription versions that I own until the end of time if I can. As long as it works “good enough,” I have no reason to go non-perpetual.

Anyway, if the problem is that you need more money, make the perpetual license $99/year and the subscription $49/year…or if you need more than that, make the perpetual license $129/year. I would rather pay much more for a perpetual license than be bound to a subscription.

The sentence that struck me the most, was “Even so, I won’t do the subscription thing, period”.

Every professional should use the best tool for the job. I myself won’t jump of the best IDE on the market (at least in my opinion) only because of this licensing change. That move would be inefficient and foolish. BUT I know for a fact that many environments and shops I work for are not like that. You miss this kind of common sense in a work environment very often. Most of the companies I have worked for just “won’t do the subscription thing, period” – not even for the best IDE in the market.

Ever heard of JRebel? I heard of it, but never had the pleasure to try it out. I never saw it being used in the wild in any of the Java projects I have done. Why? Because it is subscription based. I would have tried it personally years ago, if they had a licensing model similar to the one JetBrains just abandoned. I might have recommended it in some of the shops I worked for after trying it on my own personal license. And I am in the position to make such recommendations regularly. Just won’t happen as long as they provide it only as a service and not as a software that I can buy and then use as long as I please.

Regardless of what the eventual outcome is, can JetBrains let us know how this debacle was even allowed to happen in the first place?

Who proposed this change?

Who championed it?

Who approved it?

Which staff members, if any, opposed it?

Were any customers consulted with beforehand, to see if they considered it a good idea?

Will anything be happening to the employees and/or executives who pushed for this change?

A complete and thorough retrospective report describing how an incident like this could even take place would help restore our faith in JetBrains.

Some may say that this is an internal issue, but given the severity of this and how customers are affected, I think that transparency would be a good thing for everyone involved. We customers need to know who we’re dealing with, and what we should expect going forward.

And what do you propose once the people who suggested the idea have been publicly named? Shall we simply fire them, or do you think we need to burn them at the stake?

Here’s my idea:

Jetbrains should not do anything that will discourage its staff from suggesting any idea – good or bad – in the future.

The company made a mistake (and I say this even though I support most of the proposed changes). The important thing is how they go about correcting, not humiliating staff members for what, I suspect, is a scheme to ensure the company’s survival well into the future.

As we have learned from Mozilla, it is critical for any organization to swiftly isolate or dismiss those who contribute bad ideas, especially ones as outright disastrous as these ones have clearly been.

Any organization that does not engage in such filtering, especially when such ideas will clearly drive away existing customers, has a bleak future ahead of it.

Like JetBrains, Mozilla had several very successful software products, including Firefox and Thunderbird.

Like JetBrains, Mozilla made some changes to those products that existing users absolutely hated.

Unlike JetBrains, at least as of this time, Mozilla kept on making more and more unwanted changes to Firefox, even against continued opposition from Firefox users. As a result of these changes, and how the users’ wishes were ignored again and again, Firefox’s share of the browser market has dropped precipitously. Users won’t subject themselves to software products that cause them problems.

Despite losing users left and right, and despite a near-constant outcry from the few that remain, Mozilla continues to make bad decisions regarding the development of Firefox. Mozilla is pushed closer and closer to irrelevancy with each Firefox user who is driven away by Mozilla’s unwanted changes.

I don’t want to see JetBrains turn into another Mozilla, where the users of once-great products are alienated due to completely unwanted, unneeded, and harmful changes. It doesn’t matter if the changes are to the products themselves, or to the licensing. Changes that do not benefit users will drive away said users.

Based on the enormous amount of negative feedback here, it’s clear that these changes are a complete and total disaster. The severe backlash, especially as significant as what we’ve witnessed here, should have been foreseen.

This is the point where JetBrains needs to turn back, explain to us exactly how this disaster could have occurred, and show us how future incidents of this nature will be prevented.

As long time paying customers of JetBrains, we need to know that they’re working for us, rather than against us.

Your Mozilla analogy falls over straight away for the simple reason that Jetbrains has already said that they are considering their options, so there will be no real need to carry out your witchhunt.

Also bear in mind that Jetbrains doesn’t actually owe you a detailed log of how they choose to run their business, so I don’t really expect them to fire anyone just because you feel you’re owed something.

I think that if you are serious (European meaning) about _offering_ a subscription model, you would act like another European company who is well respected, and offer both subscription and normal licensing alternatives.

This way you give advantage to those who would like subcription, and you solve your problems with both large corporates who will refuse and the individuals who will not see advantage.

You would actually market test the ideas of your accountants, and automatically see market results in proportion, while not risking your entire operation.

By keeping a significant proportion of licenses in the normal fashion, you would give yourselves the incentive to extend and improve which is simply missing with subscriptions — another factor the economically orientated should appreciate.

All good for JetBrains — and for those who like either alternative. I hope you will this road. For me personally, it would bring back to being attracted to purchase your software, in its apparent improvement from early, early days. Let’s keep the incentives for that, ok?

We have to go through a protracted procurement process for anything that has a yearly subscription. And they’ll flat out refuse to let us “rent” anything that stops working and drops dead once the subscription runs out. So we’ll probably be transitioning away from Jetbrain tools.

I’m on Linux and generally avoid anything using SWING as it makes everything look like a refugee from the 1990’s. So it’s not going to be a big deal for me.

In certain way I can understand your move to a subscription model but renting my every day tools is not an option for me, just because I don’t think of an IDE like a service but a product.
Next month I should renew my PHPStorm personal license but I think I will wait and see how this situation evolves, because now I don’t know what to do.

Jetbrains, just remember people complain with louder voices than the people who will quietly accept it. Don’t be afraid to lose some customers. Trying to please everyone is a terrible strategy (If you aren’t making hard decisions the. you don’t have a strategy.)

You have a great product. What’s the point of having a competitive advantage of you aren’t going to take advantage of it. Raise your prices! People will still pay. It’s better to charge more while you are ahead of the competition so you can afford to innovate ahead of them while they try to catch up.

When Adobe switched to subscription pricing I didn’t like it. I resisted but a couple years, using an old version, but earlier this year I got on board. Their products are worth it to me.

If people think WebStorm is not worth $99 a year, then they are not your market. Let them enjoy Sublime nag screens. Ferrari isn’t trying to sell to people who drive Volkswagens.

“people complain with louder voices than the people who will quietly accept it” Maybe. Maybe not. It would be interesting to see the actual numbers. Jet brains should follow through and just see. Of course, there is not going back. When you lose those quiet customers, they find replacement solutions and they don’t come back.

“Sublime nag screens”? What is that? I paid for Sublime, and I’d pay again WHEN I need or want to. If you’re still seeing nag screens you aren’t in the market to buy. Same would be true for a subscriber.

I’ve used Webstorm for years now, but always went back to Sublime, and recently found Atom.io is MUCH better for my team’s workflows. I’d continue to buy Webstorm, just to have it around, but will not subscribe to it.

I appreciate the foresight to announce this ahead of time.
I appreciate the fortitude to allow anon comments.
I appreciate the courage to engage your customers feedback openly.
I appreciate the products you offer for sale.
I appreciate that you acknowledged you heard your customer feedback.
I do not appreciate the new subscription license model as described.

If left in place, I will no longer recommend we upgrade our licenses for any of your products currently used on my team of twelve or to any of my peers in the community.

Please reconsider alternative options to this new subscription plan so that I may continue to shower your company with our money every year.

This reminds me of what Keurig did with their k-cups. it just reeks of “now that you are my customer, i’m going to rape you in the ass”. seriously? if i don’t pay, my IDE stops working? holy shit. look, if you need more money, just ask. i’ll be happy to pay more for annual licenses. but to hold my project for ransom just smells like corporate greed. also, we all know the true intention of subscription models. the idea is that you get people setup recurring billing and they forget about it. i’ve worked for shady companies like this in the past. the execs laugh their way to the bank while everyone else ponders their purpose in life. i quit that job and i’ll quit jetbrains.

I hope you will re-consider. Idea of “renting” software has’t gained much popularity as far as I know. Despite many companies peddling the idea. Much less so in the circle of software developers. The idea of having to worry every single month if the payment goes through, not being able to use software if I go on a couple weeks long camping trip, or my circumstances change where I will no longer require the software on day-to-day, but might still riffle with it at some point down the road …

Adding my voice to the mix. I’ve been a customer for 5 years now and have advocated for their products at various workplaces and fellow developers. Their products are awesome. And they’ve always positioned themselves as being developer focused, building a great community and having the ear of it’s users. With this change, it really gives me pause. A huge change like this, obviously not representative of most of its user base, is a significant indication that the company has lost a core part of its value. Now I’m left to wonder what the future holds. What other changes would they make that betray what’s made me such a loyal and vocal fan? This is compounded when the very same company is asking me to subscribe to its software. Rented models like this are built around trust. Trust that you will continue to receive the same value overtime. In the event I find they are no longer the company I wish to support, I am unable to use the software.

Maybe a better idea might have been selling “bug bounties”, i.e. for X dollars you get an extra Y upvotes on bugs in YouTrack for bugs in the tool or tools of your choice to try to bring them closer to the threshold where someone will fix them.

I have a suggestion on how you can fix this whole mess.
It will take some time.
Announce that you have heard welcome feedback to the subscription, mainly from customers using multiple products. Tell them that you will still continue to offer the subscriptions as planned at the prices planned.

Then say that you’ve also heard the feedback loud and clear about the individual products licensing, and that the desire for many to ‘own’ the software they use. And that you will not be discontinuing the ownership of software, not now, not 1 year from now, not ever.

Now here is where the time part comes in…
You will need to do something over time- you’ll need to raise the prices of owned software, and owned renewals. You can’t do this now, since you already have ill will, but a year from now you can do a little, and a year from that a little more, etc.
Gradually over time, your pay prices increase relative to your subscriptions, which will make the subscriptions more attractive. When customers perceive value, you will not have to convince them. They will knock down your doors for your subscriptions, and gradually you will see a shift in your business from “buy once” to license.

Some great examples of this:
Apple Music ($10 a month for all the music you want, vs $10-14 for a single album)
CodeSchool – in this “founders talk” video Gregg talks about how he priced his courses for purchase vs subscription, strongly favoring the subscription price to influence buyers decisions https://www.codeschool.com/screencasts/founder-s-talk-part-3 it’s a 2 hour video, and a must watch for any entrepreneur.

I am a WebStorm user and I was looking enviously at IntelliJ at one point but decided I could not afford a personal license. In thinking about your new licensing model, I find it hard to justify a paid monthly subscription. All my software development projects to date were donated to the requestors. I can’t cost-justify software rentals since the money comes out of my personal income and I can’t pass the cost through to someone else. The rental prices appear to be a hefty increase in my annual cost for just the WebStorm product. JetBrains products are great, but they are used in a hotly competitive market where a lot of very gifted developers are in competition and perhaps seeing relatively little financial reward. I think a subscription model works best if you either start the business out that way and a subscription model is a natural fit for the product, and/or you have a near monopoly on a market segment, and you can force your customers to pay. For example, subscriptions would work well with dynamic DNS services. Users can accept that kind of service/subscription model. But subscriptions would seem to be a much less natural fit for IDE software, which has always been distributed either for a single license fee, or at no cost at all. Telling a developer that he or she will have to pay up or the software will shut down then and there, in mid-project, is distressing. I had IntelliJ do exactly that to me and after considering what my project would be used for, I decided not to pay the $200. So it rather feels like I’ll be paying a substantial amount of money under the threat of seeing my projects shut down totally. With a threat like that, maybe I had better look more closely at Eclipse, and perhaps try to contribute to it. Dissatisfaction with licensed software did give the world Git, and Git works great!

You’re creating great tools and we’ll pay whatver it costs to use them, not matter what the license model is. We’re working 8+ hours a day with PhpStorm, PyCharm, YouTrack, TeamCity, the Hub and soon Upsource and if you’d offer an alternative to Confluence we’d probably use that too because every single one of your tools we tried so far was great. Keep up the good work, which we’re willing to pay for. It’s as easy as that.

3 of my coworkers expressly switched back to using Sublime from PyCharm (community edition – the FREE version, so cost was not a reason) because “PyCharm just feel laggy compared to Sublime” and that was done in full understanding that they loose the amazing introspection that you get for Python on PyCharm.

Not everything is awesome in IntelliJ territory. Although I am sticking to my IntelliJ (and all the above-the-rest language support it has for Python, Coffee, JS etc) for now, having to deal with EAP versions to solve the flicker issues and being annoyed by two red (one blinking) error lights in the right bottom corner is causing wear and tear on goodwill towards the products.

It costs money to make better products. You need better products to ask for more money.

Need extra $50-100 from me to make a tangibly-more-solid offering? Fine. Starting to complicate my life or add uncertainty to availability of the tools I pre-pay for a year for? Screw you.

Coming January 2016: Demand-based pricing! We have only N licenses available per month and you will have to bid for your right to continue to use the tool on a per-month basis!

My team has about 20 licenses that we usually purchase upgrades for each year. The way we do our budget process it is not always possible to say we can buy every year at a precise interval. I am almost %100 sure that the software stops working when the time is up model means we won’t be purchasing it anymore. Which is a shame because I love IDEA.

For me personally it works out OK because I am paying each year anyway, but for an enterprise user like my employer I can’t see them going anywhere near software that expires.

JetBrains, you have no doubt acquired a lot of enterprise customers because individual developers worked hard to convince their employers to spend the money on Intellij rather than continuing to use eclipse for free. I helped bring a former employer into the fold…there was about 25% Intellij penetration when I got there, and by the time I left nobody was using eclipse and we removed the eclipse setup pages from our wiki. A move like this severely undermines this type of good will among developers that brings new customers into the fold.

Been a JetBrains customer for ~6 years, and I’ve gotta say, unlike apparently everyone else, I welcome the change! With the products I use I will actually save money, and even if I did, so what. They are great products. And personally I just don’t care about the argument of what if I stop paying — if I stop paying, I’ve already stopped using the products. And I renew annually as it is.

Good on you for listening to your customers and trying to be flexible. I’m happy either way.

As people remarked on Reddit, this worked for Adobe and Microsoft because there were no decent alternatives. What kind of idiot MBAs would attempt alienating their entire user base with something like this??? Could you have even tried floating the idea to your community first????

I rarely write on anything on the web, but I couldn’t let this one pass.

I can see that some people who use loads of the tools might think the renting model as a good idea, but it doesn’t appeal to me as I only use IDEA, and I really don’t *accept* the possibility that it would stop working if I don’t put coins into jetbrain’s wallet.

I have a personal licence and was in the process of getting my company to accept buying licences to (about 20) other devs, but if this change goes ahead, I’ll certainly stop that. (I, myself, will give Netbeans a go, but the others will continue on Eclipse).

It’s incredible to think that from a fervent advocate, people like me will start telling others to stay away from JB (probably the same will happen to the person who convinced me to use idea). Even having a great product, the friend who advocates it is a crucial piece to make anyone jump from one ide and start from scratch on another… I really hope you listen, JB. I sincerely do.

Really dislike this model as it tell me Jetbrains wants to just focus on its enterprise customers.

Basically, now that JetBrain has a strong following they’ve made business decision that most of their money comes from enterprise customers. So, why not have a recurring revenue model from them. Focus all their resources on few small set of customers increase recurring revenues and reduce operation costs.

This is probably because the CEO (maybe unknown to JetBrain’s employees) is positioning the company for sale.

Since typically most acquired products slowdown innovation in post acquisition, this move should be a sign to developers-especially, the new ones-to move on and not invest time and energy with JetBrains products. Existing customers probably stay with them until they are really forced to be moved away so this move will make the CEO some money once he sells, but will leave everyone else feeling bitter and betrayed.

One final thought on the matter. Businesses do things to maximize their earnings. Customers pay for things that are worth the price. That’s really simple to understand. You don’t have to put a spin on it. You want more money. So, ask for it. Don’t try to be sneaky or spread the cost.

Unless you’re dealing with financial idiots, everyone knows the final cost of a subscription will be higher. After all, you aren’t in the business of reducing your earnings. You believe your product is worth more. Keep the same perpetual license, but throw this subscription idea in the trash and state your higher prices. See if your market will bear it. If it doesn’t then have a sales day and ease back down to prices your market will bear. That is less risky than losing us all.

For the few financial idiots that do want to spread the cost over time; hell, offer them a finance plan at 20% interest. You could make a killing on interest alone without any effort or support cost. The type of people that like to do that don’t really care about their budget, the bottom line or the interest, they only care about that monthly payment. Ask a car dealer for tips on how to get started. Maybe you could even offer trade-ins and put those folks “upside down” on their loans, and still achieve the entrapment you’re seeking.

I have been using PhpStorm for about 3 years. I fell in love with it the first time I used it, bought a license and uninstalled all other IDEs ( Zend Studio, Netbeans, etc). Currently, I use PhpStorm, Android Studio and MacVim for all development needs.

I was very upset when I read Jetbrains would convert to a subscription based model. I like owning what I paid for and not having to upgrade ( although I have upgraded PhpStorm every year since I started using it).

My main gripe with your subscription model is that I don’t own the IDE and I have to pay almost the same amount per year (79 vs 99). I loved the I could get access to all of your products for $20 a month. IntelliJ costs a fortune, and I have always wanted to try out Ruby.

Here are my suggestions :
– Continue perpetual license model for those who want it. I can afford to pay you today, it might not be the case tomorrow so I prefer a perpetual license if I am just using one IDE.

– Those don’t mind subscription based model – offer them more of a discount than $20 for a single IDE.

— You can also offer the subscription model for the bundles (using one than one IDE can get quite expensive).

I have been a fervent and loyal user (and purchaser, and evangelist) of your products since first falling in love with IntelliJ in 2003. As a team lead/architect, I have actively pulled your products into many large organizations in the banking, finance, and health care industries. In places it was already present, I helped to expand its adoption even in the light of some management who had the [mistaken] impression that Eclipse was just as good for free. In addition to my license(s) that I have for my clients, I am a professional software development contractor, and have my own license that I pay for every single time there’s an upgrade path. Money is not unreliable, and I have never balked or reconsidered purchasing a license – you really do make great products.

At one point in 2003, I joked with my wife that I’d like to join your development team in Prague (but since I am not fluent in Russian/Czech, I was led to believe that it was not an option). If given the opportunity, I may have moved my family there.

As many others have mentioned, going to a subscription model has many very valid points behind it, and I don’t think any of those are in question.

But the idea of purchasing a license for software that I use in my professional and personal life that would not truly be “mine” is an insult, and a huge miscalculation on your part.

Add the subscription fees as an option for the larger corporate clients, no matter what they say about saving money by using Eclipse, your license fees are a rounding error to them.

But when I drop a hundred dollars or two in exchange for your product, I do it happily because I feel it’s rewarding craftsmanship. Raise the price 10-15%, I’ll still pay. But I don’t know what I’ll do yet if you change to a subscription model only. Maybe it’s roughly the same amount of money – I don’t think it really matters. The idea that if my payment doesn’t go through (due to expired credit card, etc.) could make me unable to use my product that I BOUGHT, that’s pretty hard to swallow.

+1 I have *exactly* the same background as Rick (saving the part of wanting to move the family to work for Jetbrain).

Also, on top of that, I’m also a university professor in computer engineering that has been introducing and evangelizing your products (that you kindly provide for free via de Education License) for 8 years now to hundreds of students, who after leaving the uni they push for your products as well on their respective companies.

Please consider including the option to retain a perpetual license after paying the subscription for 12 months.

I love your products and hope to keep on using them, and although your new pricing model might make sense from a business perspective, as a loyal customer, I expect to have choice. I would appreciate it if you considered keeping both pricing models – the old one allowing me to buy a license with yearly upgrades, and the new one, allowing me to rent your software.

Please let me have the choice of deciding how I pay for software license.

The language used by some developers here, almost as if they are entitled to whatever price they want. Come on guys… jetbrains is a company.. they can price it any way they like.. at least they are listening… let us see how this one goes…

I think the safest way out of this is to offer both licensing models.. and see 2-3 years down the road which one is more popular..

If jetbrains insists of subscription model.. then they ought to rename their company to “nilbrains… develop with fear…”

I love playing video games, I purposefully avoid games with subscription models. As a result there are a number of games I avoid playing because I don’t feel the subscription model adds any value; I feel that same way with your software. Furthermore, I feel that the subscription model would substantially devalue your software in my mind.

I will be advising my employer against paying you any further money and I will be avoiding your products until you avoid this fool’s errand of the “software-as-a-service” model.

Though I think all reasons were given, I just want to vote against the new payment model, too. I despise any subscription model and try to avoid them in any case. But in Software – as in anything you do not really ‘consume’ – it is simply a no-go. Perhaps I would pay monthly instead of a yearly fee, but I will never pay for a software which I can’t use anymore after I decide, I do not need it that much at the moment – or perhaps can’t pay if I am in bad luck. Please decide fast – for I will have to get myself liking an alternative otherwise. It wouldn’t be the first time. Like most users, I didn’t start programming with your Software. At some point, I simply decided it ist more comfortable and efficient and worth the money.
Apart from that, thanks for the superb software and the nice time with it.

We’ve pushed hard to get IntelliJ licences at my company. With this need model i can see us going back to Eclipse. Aside from the ‘renting’ thing IDEA is the only tool we have any need for.
I really hope i don’t need to relearn Eclipse shortcuts

As others have indicated it’s really pretty simple, isn’t it? Just keep the existing licensing options while also offering the new subscription model. Everybody will be happy, and if the new model is as attractive to the customers as you claim everybody will switch to it in a short while.

You’re right. And after reading that, I’ve actually leaned a little more in favour of the rental model.

First of all, Jetbrains needs to work out the real size of the naysaysers. The internet is an echo chamber, and the folk who don’t really mind are less likely to say so.

Many people are complaining that they will no longer be able to choose when to upgrade and when to skip a revision. I suspect these people are the main reason that Jetbrains felt the subscription model necessarily.

Many people are complaining that they will no longer be able to choose when to upgrade and when to skip a revision. I suspect these people are the main reason that Jetbrains felt the subscription model necessarily.

I agree, and it seems like the real reason why this is happening, although it may not have been said exactly that way.

The problem with this is that it should have pointed out to them that what they were doing wasn’t working, so perhaps striving for the new, great features was the wrong way to go and more focus on fixing defects might have had more draw for the people that were not upgrading.

Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, but for me personally, the reason I don’t like this model is 100% the lack of perpetual license. I was already considering the software a yearly subscription anyway. Even if there was a 0% discount between subscribing for a year or subscribing month to month, I would go for a year anyway. Money is not the issue.

If the situation was identical to what it is planned except that anyone that subscribed for a year at a time received the same perpetual license to whatever version was final at the end of that year (as it works now), I would be a happy camper. Higher price or lower price? Doesn’t matter.

Now, in the other thread I said I was trending towards giving the next version a miss, and that was 100% due to the fact that software defects that actually affect me are not being addressed at all (unless you count having the “fix in build version” continually advanced to a future build).

I would 100% give them another year under this new system to see how they use this new revenue stream to address things. Would we start seeing a regular monthly point release that addresses bugs? I would hope so. Even if the bugs fixed were not the ones that I constantly bump against, at least I would regain hope that mine would be gotten to in time, because after the last few years, I’ve lost that.

However I need the assurance of a perpetual license. Not everyone does, I’m sure.

The problem with this is that it should have pointed out to them that what they were doing wasn’t working, so perhaps striving for the new, great features was the wrong way to go and more focus on fixing defects might have had more draw for the people that were not upgrading.

True, but when you get right down to it, there’s pretty much nothing they could say that wouldn’t get someone’s ire up. This is the internet, after all.

Even if the announcement had been “IntelliJ Ultimate is now free!” there would be grumbling from people complaining that this means they’re dropping development or quality will go down or features will go away or something.

I have been upgrading ReSharper almost every year for the past decade. I don’t mind paying them monthly.

My problem is what happens if I can’t pay the monthly fee for a couple of months, or if I lose access to the Internet for a couple of months? Then I can’t even use ReSharper with the new model.

I’ll be glad to pay incrementally for quality software, but if I need to stop paying for a while, or if I can’ t access the Internet for a while, then I need to be able to use the version software which was current when I stopped paying.

Thank you for making my annual subscription cheaper. You make great tools and I will continue to buy your products.

It sounds like the majority of the complaints are from people who were not consistently buying your products to begin with. Good riddance. I am happy to pay a quite modest fee for tools that multiply my productivity. Please don’t stop.

“It sounds like the majority of the complaints are from people who were not consistently buying your products to begin with. Good riddance”

First of all, maybe you should read all of the complaints before you make blanket statements, because most of them are from people who HAVE been updating regularly but they have problems with “renting” and not owning, or the “phone home” factor.

Secondly, being a customer with a company is a two way street. Just because they make software you like doesn’t mean you should be obligated to keep purchasing it.

If they want people to keep paying, added value needs to be there. That can come in the form of new features, but it can also come in the form of constant, regular bug fixes that make it seem like the product is moving forward for you even if the new feature is not a draw.

Financial constraints can stop purchases, but so can not seeing any value in an update. That could be something as simple as “I don’t need feature X” but it can also be something as simple as “bug fixes are not frequent enough”.

The subscription aspect I can live with and personally I’d pay yearly for all the desktop products. What really bothers me is the “call home” “feature” and therefore I won’t be able to advocate any of your products to my customer base, which currently own many Jetbrain licenses (I figure after this move they’ll move back to other products). My customers are mostly in the financial industry and many of them don’t have access to the Internet (by choice, for security), so the “call home” is not really an option. Therefore, you’d need to figure out license delivery through means other than electronically.

I think you guys are doing yourself way more harm than you think if you switch to this model. Your clientèle are developers; Senior developers mostly I think and we are a curious sort. We buy your products not only because they are good, but also because once you buy the product you effectively own it. Taking that away will definitely make you loose customers.

I do like the idea of trying out a different IDE (like CLion) at a lower price. The monthly price would allow me to do this more easily. This however is only advantage I can think up and in the end this very little.

I would like to add that the FAQ entry for why it is better for us is pathetic. Lower entry prices: Yes. All the other points are nothing but marketing jargon; An excuse for the actual much higher prices for a great majority of us. Please think this over carefully and correct the FAQ.

Please stay with the current payment model. Subscription based payments models work for Adobe or Microsoft because there is no real alternative to their software. For IDEs there are enough alternatives.

IMHO.
Subscription based payment is for services. Something that you need to run with lot of effort.
Office, Adobe stuff also Jetbrains stuff are products not services. Are you selling products or you are selling ability to develop in given environment/language? I think you are selling the “way how” not “know how”.

This change means PHPStorm, best IDE for PHP dev (which I was recommend to several times), will die. No new features, bugfixes. After some years it will be priceless piece of software. RIP. There is 2 way for me.

First I can use service called PHPStorm, but I must paying monthly (yearly) twice as much as I was payed for yearly maintenance of my IDE.

Second alternative is give my IDE to JetBrains as gift, and I got new service for old yearly price. But only if I paying without interruption.

PHPStorm have many helpful plugins, but what motivate anyone to create or maintain plugin for IDE which (s)he doesn’t own? There is huge amount new technologies month to month, and I think only with help of community can any IDE support majority of that.

I think, the new pricing model is a wrong decision. JetBrains will lost many customers and his great products will change to ordinary service.

As another polyglot developer, who was facing yet another license for ReShaper, thank you. $20 a month for everything will be a huge savings for me. Plus, I always like having the latest version of an IDE. I’m looking forward to AppCode 4.0.

I just heard about this from my feeds and immediately panicked… we’re mostly an Eclipse shop, but I’ve been slowly converting people over to IntelliJ. But we’re also an internet-restricted shop with a frequently multi-month acquisition process. I fear that the subscription model would be so antithetical to our environment that we’d have to stop using IntelliJ (or switch over to Community).

I’m glad to see that you’re reconsidering this pricing model, and hopefully you’ll be able to come up with a hybrid approach that allows both subscription and perpetual licenses to be offered.

I have just bought the IntelliJ ultimate license for the first time. Although the IDE is still far from perfect (at least the Ubuntu version that I tried) it is better than Eclipse.

I have been, until now, advocating the usage of the tool at my current company but with this change in the licensing model I will stop doing that and probably will not buy again another license for myself.

What type customers does JetBrains prefer to have from this change on?

Clearly, most people arguing against the subscription are “owners” of personal licenses or small shops where money is/can be tight. (Some are from bigger companies where subscription is a no-go by policy…)

Now, you should ask yourself: Do we (JetBrains) want to have such customers too?

If you do not like them, because they are loud on the Internet and use bad language (sometimes), please remember they also were loudly advocating your products (e.g. on reddit /r/php ) to the whole world…

But if you like them, give them a perpetual license — even for an extra fee!
If your customers are mostly big companies and they like your subscription you loose not very much.
But if your customers are mostly individual developers ans small shops and take their choice of license away — you will loose a lot.

But I’m only a single developer and not your preferred type of customer…

I have used your products for Years. I have also convinced my other colleagues and friends to use PHPStorm as I think its really intelligent.
With this new subscription plan in effect I can no longer continue to buy your licenses and neither can my company buy it for me, though its a big company. They’ll never agree to buy this monthly subscription for any of their employees.
I think the minds behind the development of these IDEs are intelligent and sharp but the minds behind the marketing are dump.
Kindly revert it back to the original subscripton. Thank you.

It’s disappointing to see so many reactionary, negative responses to this news (the original post, that is.)
JetBrains, you make good products and you deserve to get paid for them. Why do so many people (on the internet) have a problem paying money for software?!?!
Consider, everyone, that IntelliJ CE is still given away for free!

I have no problem in paying for software, paying for MP3 or paying for video on demand. I strongly disagree with people who think that everything on the Internet should be free (just doesn’t make sense). I am the one saying “don’t use Eclipse just because it’s free: the right tool for the right job, even if you have to pay for it”.

Saying that, I’ve had the option to rent a car or buy a car. Rent a flat or buy a flat. Until now I’ve been buying software, not renting it. I can see that this model is spreading and have advantages for some. But on the other hand, I would still like to have the choice, and be able to buy my software and not rent it.

I’ve loved/evangelized/used/supported IntelliJ IDEA since 2.0. I switched from Sun ONE Studio to IntelliJ IDEA and never looked back.

I love the current subscription licensing. Please consider keeping the perpetual licenses as an option for personal developers. I could not convince the companies I work for to purchase licenses so I pay for my own personal license myself. You guys have the best IDE on the market (free or otherwise).

For me, it’s not about the money, I feel like JetBrains is very fairly priced, and maybe even a little underpriced in terms of the value I get from it even with yearly upgrade fee. However, it is just very difficult for me to commit to a product that will stop working if I fail to feed the meter. The world has enough rent-seeking behavior without applying it to what is (IMHO) one of the best IDEs every written — one for which I would gladly fork out my once a year upgrade fee to have the latest as a perpetual license. It would break my heart (and hurt my productivity) to stop using the product, but I will have to carefully examine whether I may have to do so.

Renting Software is one of the worst possibilities I can imagine. But let’s start from the beginng.

I used to upgrade all 2 years and I was fine with that. Then you changed two years ago the rules and I was forced to make every year an upgrade for not loosing the upgrade discount. That was the limit.

And now you want to force us (your customers) paying 119,- Euro instead of 99,- Euro + Vat per year.
I know there is some timely limited offer for 89,- Euro + Vat till 01.01.2017.

So this is one aspect that I am not satisifed at all.

Another aspect, with much more impact is the fact, that I will be always be forced to move to the newst version?

And let us be honest with each other, the quality of a new major IntelliJ version is always POOR. So poor, that I am not even looking at the new major IntelliJ version before April. From November till April I avoid any new IntelliJ beacaus of my experince from the last 15 years.

So, do you force your customers to always have the newest version installed?
In this case it seems rather likely that I will change to NetBeans.

I just found out about this, and I really am not a fan of the subscription model, particularly that it shuts down my software. I’ve been a long time user of Jetbrains software, and the how friendliness of the software licence has been a key point in helping me get the software into each company I’ve worked for.

I just wanted to chime in. I really like PyCharm, and have been gathering a case together for our company buying some licenses instead of using the Community Edition (which is fantastic). Like many others here, subscription licensing versus one time purchase is a _huge_ deal at my company, and it’s unlikely they would approve any kind of subscription. I’ve seen many a software deal killed on that alone.

Personally, I’ve almost pulled the trigger a few times on both PyCharm and CLion, but haven’t yet. Maybe that makes my opinion worthless. I’m an almost sale, who hasn’t ever paid you a thing.

Personally, I don’t know if I’ll be working on Python and C forever- but I am going to be for the foreseeable future (years). In the subscription world if I stop doing Python and C work I’d cancel my subscription and lose all access to the tools. If I have to dive back in briefly, I would probably learn another IDE (I would _not_ simply pick up a license for a month) or use a text editor. If I still owned a license, I would probably be back in the IDE, and thinking about upgrading.

So, like others I have these suggestions:

After a year of subscriptions to a tool, the current version of that tool becomes a permanent license, and no longer needs to phone home. Ever.

Allow a full year to be purchased in advance with no automatic reup, no phone home requirement and the option to upgrade through the year. (Essentially, traditional)

I can, and will, do the reasonable subscription prices per month for PyCharm and CLion if it leaves me with a usable copy when I cancel my subscription. I won’t do it if I’m left with NOTHING to show for all my cash. Because that’s what you leave people with after hundreds and hundreds of dollars- NOTHING.

Please reverse this change (or at least still allow for perpetual licensing), I just switched to IntelliJ and paid for the full license. There are a lot of good posts above mine about negative impacts of this (e.g., I wouldn’t develop a plugin for IntelliJ now). It just makes me uncomfortable to have to rent software and have yet another recurring bill. If I go between jobs do I still pay for it, etc… I do understand that there is business value in this model, and I think yeah this is a great option for tons of people. But it is also an option that I think is very negative for perhaps a large minority of your users.

I don’t have a problem with the subscription model per se, my problem’s with what can happen under it and my inability as a user to mitigate problems. What happens under my subscription if JetBrains decides to stop offering a product I need? What happens if there’s fatal incompatibilities or problems in a new version and I need to stay on an old one? Take a look at the Adobe CC 2015 debacle for example, there are bugs in it that make it just plain fail to work and there’s no way to revert to the working 2014 version because the subscription’s for the current version. For a professional whose livelihood depends on their tools working this isn’t a viable situation, we need to know we have a fallback if things go off the rails.

One solution that’d work for me is a provision that if you’ve paid for at least 1 year of subscription, if you don’t renew the license automatically converts to a perpetual license for the versions your subscription was on when it ended. Combine that with a provision that a license covers all earlier versions and I’m safe.

Financially the subscription makes little difference, it costs me the same amount under both systems, but I need assurances in the license terms that I won’t find the world suddenly yanked out from under me. Ideally I won’t need them, but let’s face it I’m a software engineer. I don’t believe in Murphy so much as I have to keep smacking the guy to keep him from stealing my coffee. I want a plan B, and I don’t want to run out of plan Bs before I run out of problems.

I use JetBrains products at work, but not attached to the internet due to security. I am concerned that even though we would want to use JetBrains products, we will no longer be able to due to this decision and licensing model.

Further, I am concerned that if customers of JetBrains react negatively, that the software may become Abandonwere after JetBrains closes.

Because of this, if this continues, we will be forced to transition to less desired products that we can continue using in our enviorment.

When I start a software project, I don’t need to be distracted by having to upgrade in the middle of it. Learning changed features/new features takes me away from my code concentration. Let me choose to upgrade AFTER i’ve completed my project. This subscription strategy will undoubtedly make me go back to EclipseIDE.

My employer will not pay subscriptions for software as a matter of policy, but they will pay for updates. This means that instead of getting update payments because I use PHPStorm you will not get another penny, and I will just continue using the last perpetual license available to me. I like your software very much indeed (my employer bought it at my urging) but this is a wrong-headed move on your part.

I’m in favour of a subscription model. I’ve been using WebStorm for 1 year and I felt the previous model (buy/upgrade) was silly, it incentivises JetBrains as a business to do big timed upgrades. With a subscription model I hope the incentive will shift towards many incremental upgrades, a feature is rolled out once it’s ready. I’ve seen this subscription fear before in gaming, music, and movies but it has nearly always made things better.

This only gives JetBrains incentives to roll out updates SLOWER. They can now drag-out updates giving only a taste hear and there to keep you subscribed, instead of actually putting out something of substantial value in a stand-alone update/purchase.

I think worst thing in new subscription model is a fact that if I’ll not pay for some reason I unable to use IDE at all (even old version of IDE without support)(unfortunately for some use cases open source version of your product doesn’t has any sense).

Also you increased prices for new customers – it also bad thing, because some times is too hard promote your tools for others teams members and bigger price will stop more developers.

I went avid to see what was written in the link, but was really disappointed. The person there missed the point. The main problem is that loads of people strongly disagree with a subscription model for IDEs and it’s not about paying for software, after all we are not getting JB’s stuff for free, right? I’ve been renewing mine yearly consistently…

– Buying a software which stops working when not paying – for production purpose unimaginable
– What’s about the maintenance of an existing project? Pay for the latest features without using these features
– What’s about a project with breaks? Pay for software without using it
– I’m sure the buying department of large companies will not accept this model – they will carry on using eclipse
– and so on …

I really dislike the new licensing model. I’d prefer to be able to own the product, and to be able to use it even when the updates stop; not to be forced to use another IDE when I end my subscription. I really hope you guys will reconsider your choice, because I am one of the many developers who would most likely not be taking a subscription.

I have the last version of IntelliJ. I can buy a subscription BUT I will not do it. The reason is a subscription model is too risky. I could have money today, perhaps I do not have money assigned to pay for an IDE tomorrow and that will generate unwanted issues to work with my code.

And what if you decide later increase the price of the subscription? I will not risk my work in a model like that!

I love intelliJ because it solves problems. I can do it perfectly fine with other IDEs in case of need. What I will not do is creating myself potential problems to access to MY code.

I used to be an avid Photoshop user, I still use CS6, but I will NEVER rent Photoshop for my needs and I have been brushing my skills with GIMP even if it’s not a 100% equivalent, at least, I don’t have to pay 30$ a month for something I use sporadically.

As for Jetbrains stuff, I usually upgrade every year the three products I use, and by my calculations, renting is gonna cost 150$ US BUT the second I stop paying I got nothing. I’d rather pay 50$ more and have the option NOT to renew. But that’s me and for my personal use at home for self training and hobbies.

As for corporations, this is the 20 years experience IT professional talking now, I can guarantee at a 100% certitude that Jetbrains is going to loose many corporate customers. All my employers in the past have been large companies, convincing your boss or a departmental Director to pay one 200$ license is a piece of cake since most of the time he pays for it with his budget and large corporation simply don’t care about 200$ if it means the developer will deliver … however, trying to convince Corporate Provisioning to pay a recurrent bill forever is simply daydreaming in technicolor because you then need to do to have it approved by Finance AND Legal, and that is assuming this is not a governmental corporation because that means you need to do an RFI and an RFP because corporations need to be able to bid on the contract and this a legal requirement to prevent favoritism (I know, it does not exactly work but that’s the process to follow) . ALL major corporations that are not development shops work this way. I really hope someone at Jetbrains is listening and reading my post because someone at Jetbrains does not seem to know how corporate provisioning works in a large corporation and this is going to cost Jetbrains a lot of business.

Glad to hear that you’re acknowledging the issue! I do hope you won’t scrap the toolbox idea, it’s a fantastic idea. Just keep the perpetual licenses around too and I think almost everyone will be happy.

I think the biggest issue most of us have is that the choice to switch was taken away from us. If you offer both options, you may see that the adoption of a subscription-based model is fairly popular among certain developers (who knows, maybe it’ll be the majority!). You just need to let them come to that conclusion on their own.

JetBrains has historically engendered a lot of love from the developer community. I hope you realize that is more important than your bottom line for the current fiscal year. As advocates, we are collectively better than your best sales reps and destroying goodwill among your userbase is going to do long term damage to the future growth of your company.

At work, we have a situation where our product (a gradle built war that runs on tomcat) can be run on Idea13 with small ease: create/add a local tomcat server from the Idea configuration, mark the exploded war and run it via the added tomcat conf.

Starting with version 14, the same setup doesn’t work. It took us a total of two weeks to figure out how to run that same war. When we finally figured it out (we had to manually add some directories to the war artifact), it turned out that in some cases, spring servlets were still not being found/used correctly. So guess what, we had to switch back to idea13. Which is still an awesome piece of software.

Granted, our product could’ve been coded better, the example presents a big problem for the new subscription model: I don’t want to pay for software that doesn’t work or for features I don’t or can’t use. When I buy software, I am paying for that particular set of updates. If I get free updates for x amount of time: cool, but it’s not crucial, because I already have what I need (because I paid for it). If I need the update, I’ll pay for it.

Why not use both models concurrently? Like Microsoft is doing with Office.

I understand why there are lots of people who don’t want their *only* option to be the subscription model, but for me, it’s very welcome news. I’m already paying annually to keep my R# and IntelliJ current, and with this new option, I’ll be paying less and getting more.

1. We need to be able to keep using the software.
(If you’re stuck on the subscription thing. I liked the compromise where if you subscribe for a year (or already have a license now), you get perpetual rights on the major version that came out the last 12mo period where you paid. So if we commit to your tool, we benefit long term too.)

2. Phoning home and disabling the software is unacceptable. If I go to space with my laptop, I want to be able to use my IDE after 30 days. You have to understand that piracy will happen and more DRM-like features is not something we will tolerate. The tools I currently use are basically just fancy text editors.

In fact – piracy helps you directly, like it did for microsoft – people get used to your tools and as soon as they get to professional settings, they will pay for them. It’s a win win for you anyways – so any intrusive DRM features will just annoy the paying customers. You do see that?

I have grown extremely fond of JetBrains as a company over the past decade. You’ve maintained a track record of producing high quality software, making significant contributions to the open source community, and treating your customers with respect.

I felt good purchasing products from JetBrains and I enthusiastically recommended them to my friends and coworkers. Now I’m conflicted.

This new subscription licensing announcement threatens to cast away all of the hard-won goodwill you’ve built. I hope that you’ll reconsider this decision.

I am not in a target audience but the subscription model is not for me. I have renewed a personal license from time to time at least since 2006. I updated when it seemed helpful to do so. I am retired so do not need the latest and greatest and will end on version 14, or 15 if it should be released in time.

Another company goes the “money grab” route with a subscription model.

I’m afraid that, as good as your tools are, and as long as I’ve been using them, I will cease to be a customer once the subscription model comes into force. I’m simply not going to be gouged on a regular basis.

I’ve only heard about the announced licensing changes today but as a multi-year Resharper Ultimate owner I honestly think I’d rather discontinue my use of all JetBrains products than move over to a subscription model. I own my development tools; I do not rent them nor will I ever.

If this change does indeed stay then I personally will no longer support JetBrains financially by purchasing their products; or recommend them to my colleagues and company.

Another long-standing customer here, who has stopped and dropped using Adobe tools for pretty much the same reasons as I will stop using Jetbrain’s IntelliJ IDEA.

Essentially: it’s an unacceptable move from your end.

– I want to be able to own software and decide on my own for how long I’m going to use or not use it and not having to stop use it as soon as I’d decide to not buy into your subscription model again.
– Any kind of phoning home, logging in to be able to use an IDE, even though it’s only once every 30 days, 60 days or 20 years is not going to work for me.

Go ahead with your subscription model, but I’d strongly recommend you’d continue to offer classic licensing, otherwise you will lose a lot of developers who think along those lines, too.

This is an extremely bad move. Speaking as someone who was a customer of Adobe Creative Suite who did ride out the conversion to Creative Cloud, I can tell you guys that turning your software into a subscription-only model is a HUGE mistake.

To put it bluntly, unless you plan to follow in Adobe’s footsteps and pump out huge, feature rich upgrades throughout the course of the year then you are not offering value to us, your customers, in this change.

I have grown quite fond of using your software and planned on going commercial once my studies were done and I was no longer eligible for an academic license. However this decision to go subscription-only makes me reconsider that decision and move my development back to Dreamweaver and Brackets as I cannot justify paying two subscriptions for redundant software. The extra features of PHP/WebStorm justify a flat purchase, but not a running subscription.

I’m in a subscription model business, I have been a JetBrains customer for 4 years now, renew every year, I have a few questions for JetBrains regarding this change below. Firstly I don’t like the subscription model initially, but after looking into further as an existing customer, I actually started like the new model once I start calculate my cost.

Before: I need to pay IntelliJ for 299 to start, renewal at 99, my total cost for 3 years are 299+198 = 497, for 10 years, 299 + 99*9 = $1190 (I have paid WebStorm, but looking into get IntelliJ recently)

After: I only need to pay $119*3 = $357 for 3 years. 10 years, I pay $1190 (current customers I would pay $267 for 3 years, and $890 for 10 years.

Why don’t I do it? (May be somebody can help me check the math) If my math holds, why don’t you JetBrains do this on the site show us these Math? You marketing folks should be fired for not putting this up on your site, but rather let your customer like me to figure it out)

What’s the caveat? I can think of a few;
– Do I always need internet connectivity to use the tools? (so it can check license entitlements on-going basis?)
– If I stopped paying for whatever reason, I’ll be locked out from the tool? I can see this is a major barrier for developers.(who are not used to subscription model today, you’ll need to pay the price to educate them into this model, actually this post is one)
– For developers/enterprises do not use the products continuously may think this is a rip-off, but once they see the math above, I think they can get over it.
– The above math is good to explain to customers have been seen the value of keeping it up to date, but for new acquisitions, e.g. grad kids from school not knowing whether they want to renew down the road, they may compare the initial cost against multi-year costs just because he/she thought no need to renew in next a few years), you may have stiff acquisition cost to educate them on value of continue to paying rather than forced to pay.
– The last caveat is for you JetBrains, this is going to dis-incentivize you adding new features, may be less pressure and reduce you OpEx cost, but that may slow innovation in the space and bad for long run. But I would assume you thought this through.

A few other questions for you:
– What are you trying to accomplish from the new model? Increase revenue? (I didn’t see that from my math above), but maybe I’m wrong on my assumptions of the Math. But I definitely respect and admire companies trying to help their customer saves Money, (Those company will have longevity)
– The second is that why not A/B testing before you force this November 2 date? (Since you had other subscription products, that should not be hard to implement?
– Whats your current customer base how many uses multiple products? (which may benefit from the bundle offer?)

The argument is…, what if my financial isn’t very good that month.. and it so happens my subscription ended that month, my tools cease working! it is as if I am being held at gun point.. renew now or we pull the rug out..!..

How does that make you feel?… do you expect us to be loyal to you when we are being treated that way?

You have not learned from Adobe I guess.
As soon as you go with new subscription model – I will stop using IntelliJ IDEA. There are plenty of good alternatives in the market and probably there will be more (remember the lesson from Adobe).

What lesson? From what I see, they’re just as successful with their subscription based model. And if there really were alternatives that were just remotely as good, JetBrains’ products wouldn’t be that popular.

In fact, Adobe is not publishing any numbers so I don’t know how you can deduce that their move is a good thing and everything is going well.

Fact is, all web designers, no exception, I work with are currently looking at alternatives like Pixelmator and Afinity Photo which are giving Photoshop a run for its money and yes, they are even looking at Gimp. The only reason why they keep Photoshop for now is because PSD is the standard and for now they can’t drop it. The second they can, they will.

As for Jetbrains, it’s not like I can’t live without Resharper and that Phpstorm is the panacea that can’t be replaced with Sublime Text or Atom with PHP plugin. I love their tools, but there are many alternatives out there. Unlike Adobe, Jetbrains does not have captive users.

Well, I’m sure glad we’ve got your anecdote to prove whatever general point needs to be proven. We can now safely disregard the far more numerous voices who have voiced opposition to Jetbrain’s change.

For the most part the discussion here has been civil and useful. People have voiced there own opinion without reacting to other people’s opinions. PERFECT.

Something was in the coffee this morning, or why did a bunch of posts show up trying to one-up the other guy’s opinion?

This is a real kick to the pants. I don’t work on software projects for a living. It is a fun hobby of mine. I chose Jet Brains for my tools because they were a small edge above the rest and simplified some of my projects.

While it does seem nice to pay a fraction of the cost for a month of use, I don’t see the benefit for me. I may only try to do something for a month every other month. It would be really inconvenient for me to boot up the IDE and see a screen that says that will be $11.99 see you next month or the month after.

I am sorry to say, but I will not be renewing my licenses. I will be migrating over to the spring tool suite and others.

In the same situation. I’m a hobby programmer picking things up randomly. My work is not related to programming in any way, but an opportunity came up to use my programming knowledge and work agreed to pay a one time fee to get the software. My plan has been to keep using as is, and probably chip in the reduced upgrade fee myself when programming time justifies it, or possibly being able to justify an upgrade for work…

Subscription is just not an option for me as I’m not programming on a day-to-day basis. I sincerely hope you retain the current payment model, so us opportunistic customers can keep enjoying the aid we need

Read comments carefully. People are ready to pay. To pay more. Those who don’t want to pay are happy with the wonderful free version. But people do not want pay and take more risks at the same time.
P.S.: and developers usually have quite high IQ to be embarrassed by stupid marketing shit when they are told things which are not true.

I’ve worked either directly or indirectly as a consultant for several large enterprises. I really love Jetbrains IDE’s and I have often tried to get management to use Jetbrains. In some cases I have succeeded and it made all of us more productive.

The one thing that all large enterprises I’ve worked for have in common is that they refuse a subscription model. They want to own the tools and not have to worry about budgeting for it every year. If they want to upgrade they can budget for it and make it a priority.

I would much prefer to see both models available. I fear that you will lose many of the large enterprise customers when you only plan on having a subscription model available.

* Is an active Internet connection now required to use the tools?
* If I unable to afford the subscription renewal, I’ll be blocked from using the IDE?
* Why are you making this the only option available?

1) I do not think they are crazy
2) it would be nice that JetBrains, you let the software for at least six months, but you do not update it anymore.
3) In my experience, I’ve seen a lot of software that runs JetBrains and other companies, which are pirated copies. and then for a simplification of their costs and increase their profits, providing those who make this work, but do not have much money, you can do a monthly subscription.

Throwing my hat on the no subscription model side as well. When Adobe made this move with CC, I ceased being an Adobe customer. My copy of CS6 works perfectly well, although I have noticed recent “updates” to Acrobat Pro make it no longer function in Win8+, cute Adobe.

Let’s be clear here, a subscription model benefits the company. Any implied benefit to the customer is PR speak mixed with a dash of very unique situations. In my own experience with companies that have abandoned perpetual licenses in favor of subscription, I see the level of new features drop drastically. While the original blog post, and many replies from employees, have stated as much – this is simply a method to get continual payments for bug fixes.

I’m a small fish in a very big pond, I get that. Me, personally, not upgrading or moving to a subscription model won’t impact the bottom line of JetBrains in even the tiniest of ways. I get it. There is no use threatening to take my ball home if they don’t do what I want. But, I will take my ball home. I’ve already had to find replacements for Adobe software when necessary, moving to another IDE will be an inconvenience, but one I’m willing to accept to avoid subscription models.

I don’t like the fact that my working instrument might stop working one day if I forgot to pay the fee (or I’m in a bad financial condition and can’t afford it right now). I would keep lifetime license, even with slightly higher price. Less risks, less surprises.

Jetbrains: please reconsider this decisions… I initially purchased an IntelliJ 5 license and subsequently bought an upgrade license twice or three times (most recently IntelliJ 14) with the expectation that I would be guaranteed a free major upgrade if a release happened with a year… and now this.

I can guarantee that with this model, I am likely to _never again_ purchase a future version of IntelliJ.

I skimmed through the license agreement, and nowhere was it mentioned you should upgrade every year. So everybody had to be psychic the last 14 years and had to know they should upgrade? Even when the initial costs where two times higher than the maintenance costs?

I am growing very tired of people saying that everybody that is against this new model is a cheap-goat, not willing to pay, does not deserve this software, is a 5 year old whining child, a brad (whatever it may be).

This problem will resolve overtime, but I am very shocked about these remarks of the “pro-camp”. There are too many ad hominem attacks against people who really care, but simply cannot agree with the new model, but for sure don’t want Jetbrains to follow in the footsteps of Borland.

It is simple: if Jetbrains needs more money, they just say it clear (and not: cheaper entrance prices). If Jetbrains does not want small and hobbyist developers any longer, just say it. There is nothing wrong with reconsidering your company market position.

I’m against the SaaS model if there’s no service to provide. And no, an IDE is not a “service”. I’m also old enough to proudly have a box of Turbo Pascal that I paid with my own money when I was a student to know about that Borland demise that Henk is talking about and also had that history in my head when I read about the Jetbrains Toolbox announcement.

If Jetbrains wants to go the SaaS route, fine, but just as an option, or if that’s the only way, let us run the software perpetually if some conditions are met (i.e., after paying for a full year of “service”).

I have been paying my personal licence for the last few years, with this change it seems that I am going to stay for quite a long time on my last licence. I am not going to pay every month to use the product, it just makes no sense.

If you do not change of idea, then maybe it will be time to move to other ides. IntelliJ was not my first IDE but it seems that it will not be my last. Looking at Netbeans and Eclipse with new eyes.

It is sad to see how a commercial movement ruins all the efforts made through so many years on an IDE.

I am java developer (mostly) and at the moment I use eclipse every day, but the big project I’m working on is moving to the web and I was looking at Web Storm, as potential next IDE (as eclipse is not so good in this area).

After hearing about the new jetbrains software “renting” license I don’t think I would be willing to consider and invest time to learn (and get proficient with) Web Storm knowing that the software can just stop working anytime if license is not paid in time.

I would like to have a choice to upgrade only if I see the value in using a new version – which will most likely be the case anyway (as web technology in this area moves lighting fast) – but I would still like to have this choice and also peace of mind that my tool would work when I need it – whatever happens.

There is a tough competition in the web editor/ide space and many good paid and free tools (Sublime, Atom, Code…) are available, but I could still consider investing (time and money) in a good coherent integrated tool like Web Storm, but if the only option is to rent it then it’s a no go area for me – sorry.

I personally dislike the subscription model. It doesn’t make much sense for a development tool like an IDE. It doesn’t actually make much sense for any piece of software, and I will try to explain why.

Let’s start from the assumption that a piece of software – any piece of software – is just a tool to achieve a goal in the best way, for your definition of “best”. Maybe you want to reach the goal faster, maybe you want to reach the goal with a higher degree of precision. Whatever your definition of “best” is, it’s up to you choosing the right tool for the job. When you have your tool, you will use it again, and again, and again.

At some point in time you might realise that there is another tool on the market that can enable you to reach goals in even a better way than you do now. Then you collect your money, buy your new tool and happily use it. Or maybe you are happy with your current tool, since the level of “best” you reached is already more than satisfactory for your needs.

I don’t want to be “forced” to update my tool every month. Updating a tool every month requires money and, sometimes, a relevant mental effort in understanding how the latest bell and whistles work. Let’s also say that I’m a Java developer, and I predict that I will professionally write Java and only Java for the next 10 years. Why do I have to pay for the latest changes in Scala, Groovy, or – may I be forgiven – CSS plugins?

I want to be free to buy my tools, use them, learn to accept their limitations or buy new ones when I grow out of them. No piece of software should be provided with a subscription model. Sometimes we just forget that even the best and most complex IDE is no better than a hammer – and I wont’ pay a hammer month by month.

I was on the verge of finally migrating from another IDE to intelliJ after a coworker had been evangelizing your product to the rest of the development team ever since I started working with him, always telling me how much better things are in your IDE offering and how it’s worth buying it out out of my own pocket. Now he says he’ll never buy upgrades again. You definitely lost me as a customer, but losing him will cost you at least one positive avenue of word-of-mouth, and any people he might have converted in future. Have fun wringing those pennies, but some of us prefer buying something outright and having it around when we need it.

For about 99.8% of the responders here, all they want is choice. I thought of something that is a rough analogy to that. A major-name-brand tire manufacturer knows they will only sell x of their-major-name-branded tires of a certain size at price x. After that, they manufacture a bunch of the same tire rebranded as something else, i.e. as Motomasters , in Canada. They are sold for less than what they charge for the major-name-branded ones, but they know that they would not have made an additional dime otherwise. Better to make some money than nothing; and selling some even for a little less still doesn’t tarnish the brand or future revenue (that’s where you really have nothing to be concerned about — it’s not a perfect analogy, I’ll admit – but everybody gets respected in either case, and everybody knows it) . So why not just offer us the choice? You will get everyone who wants the subscription, and everyone who doesn’t want the subscription and wants perpetual licenses. How can you possibly lose? You can’t possibly want people to purchase the product grudgingly.

In short, no, please not yet another subscription service. By all means tell us, you need no of dollars to make it economic for you to produce the product, but subscription services are prob not the way to go about it. Especially given the community whom are customers, we may be loyal… but we can be fickle.

In all honesty this new model isn’t going to cost much more. But the idea that i purchased an indefinitely less than a year ago could become completely unusable if i choose to keep it up to date is not cool.

Like others here, i find it very strange to move from a model that works for users to one that doesn’t work as well and claim its an upgrade?

Unfortunately i can’t upgrade my current licence to stick around for another year because it has not expired… So I guess come February i’m on the lookout for another IDE.

It is a shame, i mean even with the weird shortcuts and a not insignificant amount of bugs, IDEA really is the best IDE out.

I see a lot of people complaining about the price increase. I guess these are individuals who use the cheaper products. Our company currently pays JetBrains more than $400 per year per developer, and is happy to do so to get the latest bug fixes and enhancements. In effect, we rent/subscribe to it now.

The new “subscription” model would save us more than $100 per year per developer if we didn’t qualify for the existing customer discount. We do, so the savings would be more than that.

But we care about total cost of ownership and business risk, more than up front cost. This new model has an unacceptably high potential TCO. Our year’s savings could be wiped out in one go if we arrive one morning and find our IDE won’t work. Yes we could, on that day, switch to something else. But that would cost us in time and lost output. And once we had gone to the trouble of switching, where would the motivation come from to switch back a few days later once the problem was resolved?

If there was some guarantee that couldn’t happen, we would be very happy with the new model. But there are way too many things that could (and do) go wrong. From delayed payment processing to Internet access problems (we’ve had that problem with other software) to the licence server being off the air (also experienced before, and the “compensation” is never enough) to Jetbrains closing down or being bought to increasing the price overnight (has also happened to us in the past: that was a 10x increase almost overnight).

I don’t expect JetBrains to change just because I would like to continue using their products. They need to work out what works best for them. And the number of people saying they only upgrade when there are new features explains why JetBrains see a need to change. My hope is that, by explaining the problem our company has with the new scheme, JetBrains will find a way to address these problems so that we can continue to pay for their products every year. As we are clearly not the only company with similar concerns, maybe my hope will be realised.

Count me in as someone who has been using your products for a decade but cannot accept this kind of licence. Small developer cannot afford this, I’ll look into alternatives if I can’t buy/own my IDE from you.
I also didn’t like when you changed your licensing scheme a several years ago, this is much worse.
And in the meantime, I STILL have problems with an external clipboard manager that hasn’t been fixed for years now.

Currently, we are upgrading our IntelliJ Ultimate license to the latest version every 2-3 years. That’s about 100€ – 150€ per year taking the current upgrade price of 300€ into account.

With your new model, you ask us for 200€ per year and in case we need a completely new license, it’s even 400€ per year.

How do you justify this increase? Usually, we are not in a big need for the new features besides proper support of new Java versions.

We as a software product company are not against a subscription model in general, but you should cut your price by at least 50%. Otherwise, we will stay on an old license for years to come or even switch to the community edition or Eclipse.

One thing to consider for Enterprise customers, at least in Europe: moving from a licensing to a subscription model means going from CAPEX to OPEX, which in some organizations could have quite a fiscal impact. In some cases the purchase processes behind the two models can be very different, it’s not automatic that a large organization can switch overnight, due to internal bureaucracy. Both models have benefits and drawbacks, I’d suggest to find a way to offer both options and let customers choose the one best fitting their own model.

I have to say that while I generally always support the choices made by JetBrains by renewing their products, I have to say that this doesn’t give me much faith.

Like many others, pricing for me isn’t a concern, the loss of licence ownership is the biggest problem. I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who owns a personal licence and convinced my company at work to buy 5 commercial licences.

I don’t always develop at home in my spare time, sometimes I have a month or two between projects. Some would say that this licencing model might work well for me, but I am inclined to disagree. If I want to just open up the editor and do something then that is going to be a pain if I then have to jump onto the website and enter my card details to get going again. If however I only spend 1 day messing around and decide to can what I am doing, then I have wasted a months usage. I also don’t like the idea of being obligated to develop because I have paid for limited use of the tools.

At work we recently went through a bit of a tough spot with the IT budget (me and my colleagues are part of an IT/Software team in a non IT related company) and have been unable to secure licencing for other software/tools we require until the new financial year comes around. This isn’t a problem for our IDE’s though because we own the licences. However, if we hit a rough patch and need to pull money from different places then our IDE’s are going to be one of the first things to go. We will be told to just go and use the free alternatives that we made use of before purchasing your own products.

As you can see, my primary concern is to do with licence ownership. One of the best ideas I saw somewhere was to lock in the IDE version that someone could use for every 12 months of subscription (or which ever version was active when they stopped paying any number of months after 12). I want to know that the tools will always be available. Please leave some form of the current licencing model in place.

I abhor subscription models, I know they are going to work well for you, but they don’t work well for me, or many other customers as you can see. I can’t recommend your products (with subscription models) to others when they are so happily using free products that work for them.

I am hopeful that you will work something out, I just want to let you know where another loyal customer lies.

My fear with the new licensing is: What happens, if in 2017, when everyone is on the new model, Jetbrains “pulls an Oracle”. Say someone of the founders/owners needs / wants to cash in (for whatever reason, divorce,…), or just for the argument, assume Jetbrains being bought by Oracle. Jetbrains then might just feel like tripling/quadrupling the monthly fee, accepting to lose some percentage of customers on the way. Then we as developers/customers are hosed.
I hate being on the hook for this. Thats why I oppose the “when you stop paying, the software will stop” licensing model.

Second thing: As not always being a full-time developer, I may be fine with working on an older version just for maintaining older stuff, not requiring all the new bells and whistles. (Anyone ever thought of switching jobs, switching profession or going into retirement??)

For both points I would be fine with the “12 Month subscription gets you a perpetual version from the last time you were subscribed” suggestion or whatever will grant me a perpetual license without any updates.
my 2 cents.

However, I think that Jetbrains is much more likely to remain independent if they implement the subscription model.

The problem with perpetual licences is that Jetbrains only see revenue when folk deem the latest version worth the upgrade fee. (There’s a fella on newcombinator who is complaining about the subscription even though he hasn’t upgraded since version 5). Without some kind of guaranteed income then Jetbrains cannot plan for future expansion, new products or implement bug fixes (Why? Because all their resources need to be funnelled into adding new features because without them folk won’t upgrade). In this scenario, they are much more likely to be bought out by a larger company who will implement a less agreeable subscription model immediately.

Secondly, a lot of people are asking what will guarantee that Jetbrains won’t stop developing and rake in the money. Well, there are no guarantees, but there are two main reasons why this shouldn’t happen.

1/. Competition. Many have already threatened to move to Eclipse (though I bet less than half of them actually would), and if Jetbrains starts fleecing people then folk will move to new products that will eventually appear.

2/. There is no lock-in. Contrary to popular belief, Jetbrains is not holding anyone’s code base to ransom. Your source code is held as text files, not a proprietary format as it is in Word or Adobe CC. The only thing that is proprietary is the format of the project config files – and even those are held as XML. As long as I have the source files (which I do) then I can rebuild the project in another tool in minutes. From past experience, I have converted an Eclipse project, made up of thousands of source/resource files, into a IDEA project in about ten minutes. I can convert the same project from Eclipse to IntellIJ in about fifteen minutes.

I know there are other examples, but I’m with those believing that desktop software should never be a service (not talking about desktop clients to whatever services). Once it’s shipped, it’s up to me to give it enough GHz, RAM and HDD space, and I just might live with a few bugs (as I already do).

Having to pay the costs of maintaining subscription service sounds like paying the subscription for the sake of itself.

It turns out that the switch is irrelevant to a bunch of people. Startups or polyglot freelancers might welcome the switch. I totally appreciate that.

I still hope there are enough of disappointed people who simply want to keep a working version of software without continuously having to pay for it, to make you change your mind.

I’m a spare-time OSS project contributor using WebStorm for Javascript development. I’m happy with the current licensing scheme, as my usage is intermittent, depending on my available spare time – I do pay for annual upgrades. I don’t like the subscription model at all, and will probably look elsewhere once my current annual maintenance expires. Please reconsider this decision!
If you need an additional revenue stream, consider providing paid-for high-quality training materials and courses (rather than the current frankly pretty useless videos)

@JetBrains:
Why don’t you offer both the old perpetual model and the subscription model at the same time and leave the choice of the licensing model to the customers?
This will also allow you to collect real metrics which licensing model your customers really prefer – instead making decisions without any real data.

As a personal license user paying from my own pockets I am strongly against the subscription model. Switching back to Eclipse otherwise and telling everyone about it.

Maybe some hybrid method may work:
– subscription for x$ per month
– after n monts, I can choose to end the subscription. I’ll cease to receive updates, but the product will keep working. If I cease the subscription before those n monts, the product will no longer work.
– I can choose to pay n monts of subscription upfront, subscription disabled by default.
– If I interrupt the subscription and then decide to re-enable it, I’ll have to pay a “return fee” proportional to how many months elapsed since I was a subscriber, to a max of y$
– of course, pricing scheme should be modulated so that ceasing subscription and re-enabling it after n months will cost more than keeping the subscription running.

The Problem for me with the subscription model is that you put yourself into a position of power. With the old model I knew that whatever happens I would still have my bought copy and could do as I please with it. With the new one you can change your minds within a month and I suddenly have to choose between changing the IDE immediately or, if I can not change that fast, I have to suck it up and obey.
I am currently thinking of switching away from Eclipse and promoted IntelliJ so far in my company. But we can still choose to use Netbeans. It is not as great as IntelliJ but still good enough compared to Eclipse.

Also I really would like to use IntelliJ for personal projects. IntelliJ is so good that I wrestled myself through to actually buying it. Those are projects I do not get any money for. There I can stay on an older version of IntelliJ for longer and I really would hate to have to pay first everytime I want to do some coding. That completly kills the fun and I would put off development more then I want to. Even though with the perpetual license I would have to pay more I know that I can simply forget about the IDE until I require it the next time. Without the nagging feeling that I put my money into a black hole which I should stop. Or that the subscription may have expired already.

Even if I convince my company to do the subscription (which may be a huge problem still since we have to explain why this payment is monthly) I would not subscribe for my personal projects. There I can live with bash and Netbeans if need be.

I always liked simplicity of perpetual licence per product.
Moving all users to new subscription model looks like an attempt to make more money (whether it is the case or not) presenting it as a “useful feature”.
Also I guess this is a negative change from behavioural psychology point of view because we used to *own* the version of product and you suggest to *rent* it.

Overall, please treat licencing as published API and keep it backward compatible.

I think the subscription model is not as bad as many people think it is; after all if I use an IDE for almost 100% of my work routine, I would be willing to pay for the best one around and I would want to have it constantly upgraded.

But please consider providing at least one of the following alternatives to the perpetual subscription:
a) keep the perpetual license as it is today
b) add an option to close the subscription at one point without having the software deactivated; it could also be a (reasonably) paid one, the user will then have a perpetual license for the latest version when he/she closes the subscription

Of course, nothing in what JetBrains themselves has posted indicate they are in any kind of financial distress. It is entirely speculation on your part that it is the case.

They could be doing this:
-just to make a lot more money
-to do less work [don’t have to keep coming up with new features all the time]
-to make some bean-counter at an investment house happy so they can do an IPO

Even though I’m opposed to this change, I would say that most of the people who would speak up here are the people who are unhappy about the change; no useful data on unanimity could be inferred here.

Also, the announcement has been made a few days ago; finding another business model is not exactly a one-line fix, and there’s still time.

As for @MuppetGate’s “keeping JB solvent,” I don’t think that the issue stands as “either become Ubisoft, or go bankrupt, no alternatives.” The current pricing levels are rather low, for example – I would not mind paying a higher price in the current system.

Pricing isn’t the issue. If they raise the price of the perpetual licence then folk are even less likely to upgrade than they are now, especially if Jetbrains decides to focus on bug-fixes, regardless of the price.
Look at all the people here who say they want the freedom to skip versions? That’s fair enough, but the money has to come from somewhere.

Not necessarily.
People who are happy are less likely to say they’re happy. People who don’t really care that much one way or the other are even less likely to say so.
People who have a complaint will, mostly, complain – and quite rudely it seems – especially if they can do so anonymously on the internet.

Well, despite being on the same side (unhappy with the subscription) with you, if JetBrains depended only on ~1000 unhappy customers (spending generous $200/year on average) writing here for few days, they would have gone bankrupt long time ago.

Basically all the customers comfortable with ‘operational costs’ language are fine with the change, and it doesn’t make a difference that would make them leave a note here.

Also a huge “-1” for the subscription-only business model, many people already stated why. I will ditch my Intellij Ultimate instead of being forced to swallow all upcoming license or price changes, since I simply cannot pause the update subscription and still use the current state for development/support or migrate to a new IDE if jetbrains decides to go into a direction I dislike.

I won’t build my private nor potential business projects on top of the goodwill of one company, which has a killswitch for the toolchain I use. Sorry jetbrains, but that’s a no-go.

Taking a single WebStorm IDE as an example, I just simply don’t understand from the Company’s perspective, what are the benefits for the subscription model.

I guess there are two types of customers: (A) one who always upgrade to the newest version and (B) one who has bought the IDE once and upgrades only on major upgrades (let’s say only once per year — and not twice).

With the subscription model you get the same revenues from group A, so there is no benefit.

With group B however, it is a risky game; some percentage will remain with you and thus pay a bit more (forced to pay the upgrades); but a majority of them will cancel the subscription and switch to an alternative (visual studio etc.).

Very disappointing.
I have been using JetBrains products for more than 10 years both with company licenses (for Resharper , DotTrace and TeamCity) and as a private consultant with private licenses for IntelliJ and PyCharm. With this move you have lost a lot of good will on my behalf. I will probably be forced to keep current with my PyCharm license since I don’t really have any other good alternatives but I have my doubts that the money earned from this move by JetBrains will be worth the amount of good will lost.

This makes me sad and angry. If you listen – offer the subscription model as an additional way for those who like subscriptions and keep selling permanent licenses for those who are not willing/able to spend money on subscription models. I – like many others – already stopped using Adobe products because of the subscription model. Don’t want to loose Jetbrains tools as well.

I happily update my permanent license every year like i’ve done the years before. Please rethink your plans and do not annoy your up to now customers by forcing them to use subscription models. Don’t lose your overall good reputation by forcing developers to use subscription only licenses.

Developers don’t like subscriptions for tools. They wan’t to buy a license for the tool and use it until they feel like updating. If they’re happy they spread the word – if they’re pissed they start looking for alternatives.

It is ok.
I have read through all the info here: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb
It seems fair enough. My business is very reliant on JB products so cost is not the issue, time management due to alternate model is. Like many devs these days we only get perhaps an hour or two on weekends to catch up on billing. If the subscription is yearly then literally do not care about the cost because of the less risk due to payment failure and cost of management.

Hmmm. I pay a yearly payment now and am very very happy to do that. I am very time poor.

I paid $200 for a perpetual license and was going to pay $100 to upgrade to the newest perpetual license. I’ve decided to wait and see what happens first. I do find your product convenient but not unique enough to ignore the competitors.

I also see this change in subscription model as a sign that the IDEA IntelliJ IDE may soon have less universal plugin support from Jetbrains, since it would be beneficial for your subscription scheme to force us into subscribing to PyCharm than to allow us to continue to use the python plugin. This may not be the case, but the incentive is most certainly there.

I do not like the idea of having to rent my software or the need for my IDE to phone home to validate the license. I think you need to come up with a way to support your original licensing scheme, while allowing you the flexibility to rent the software to people who may prefer that model.

Because of the possible change in licensing, I’ve stopped recommending purchasing your product and told my colleagues to wait and see what Jetbrains decides prior to deciding which IDE suite to purchase.

I’m one of the people who wanted to buy your software with the perpetual license. Now – I’m thinking of staying with Eclipse. Why? I’m not coding a lot at home but when i do – I wanted to use the best IDE around – and I know it is yours. But not for this price, sorry… I can’t afford paying the subscription while I’m using it lets say 2days/week. The perpetual license was a really good deal because i could pay once and use it for a long time without worrying about any subscription. I hope you will do something with that

This is sad, but this is evidence is that the manager in this bussines are too greedy and everyone are liars. All what they are thinking is belong to the provit and how o get the money from all of us. Shame on u, if u continue this way, i will never go with u and never renew my license next year. I send a big FY to u!!!!!!! And wish u all the worst ever!!!

PS: That how to destroy a company and get a big bonus and then leave to destroy the next company to get the next bonus. mmmm I studied the wrong subject. xD

Hello everyone,
from my point of view, the subscription model is the best idea you can ever have in place of licences. As I am reading the comments here I am a bit frightened that you will change your decision. Please, don’t do it! Personally, I think that there could live two models of licencing, so everyone can choose his cup of tee.

Actually I can imagine a third way… After year of subscription you can stop to pay and use a product in state that it is. This is something I would love.

Switching to a subscription-only model sounds very risky for JetBrains to me.

Please keep the current model of perpetual license and yearly payments for updates. I believe it especially makes sense for the personal use license.

If you want to offer a time-limited subscription model in addition for a slightly lower price, that’s fine with me. Maybe there are other customers who do prefer it or would use it to “try out” the software the initial subscription period and the shift to the perpetual with yearly updates if they commit to it.

If you really insist, you could also consider “testing the waters” by offering both models for a year or two, and then if a large majority switch (doubt that though) to the subscription-model to then consider stopping with offering the perpetual licenses on purchases for new customers. Nobody will be really upset if you stop the temporary licenses model then.

Why not adopt the Atlassian model? No big lumps of features, just continuous improvement over time. You get a perpetual license for every version released while your support contract is active. That way there is an incentive to keep the support contract active to get bug fixes, not just long enough to roll over to the next major and get free bugfixes for that major forever.

I’ve got no major objection to spreading out payments on a monthly basis instead of a yearly lump sum upgrade cost. I prefer a lump sum model, but that’s just a preference. I’ve got no objection to reducing the cost for access to multiple JetBrains IDEs, though I’ve already voted with my wallet that I’m willing to pay for multiple of them at once.

What really deeply bothers me is the deadman switch: if I stop paying for a month, or if JetBrains runs into an issue that lasts more than a month, BOOM go the tools. (Just the other day I lost access to a game because the company that made it shut down. A single player game whose only use of the network was to phone home and receive approval for not firing the deadman switch. Eugh.)

I realize that there would be complications with allowing perpetual licenses to coexist with deadman subscriptions. I can imagine a nightmare scenario for JetBrains being having everyone pay for only one month, once a year, and then keep using the sufficiently-latest-and-greatest unpaid through the rest of the year at a 1/12 discount. Some of us wouldn’t use such a loophole, but probably not enough to prevent it from being a death sentence. I’m not interested in scenarios that are a death sentence for JetBrains.

That said, I’m also not interested in nightmare scenarios where, after investing in ongoing development of a tool over multiple years, a user would be left empty-handed should they have reason to stop paying (e.g. if Microsoft bought JetBrains and …). I know there are people who prefer to rent or lease their tools (vehicles, dwellings, computers, spouses, furniture, etc) but I’m very much not one of them. I don’t mind spread out payments (loans, mortgages, rent-to-own), even if some of them are effectively perpetual (pay off mortgage, take new mortgage for improvements, pay off new mortgage, take new mortgage for further improvements, etc), but such things are still fundamentally investments – I have something more than font memories to show for all that payment, after it’s done.

There are lots of ways to avoid both nightmares simultaneously. One that I find appealing is a rolling rent-to-own model: When a tool launches, it checks a local ‘payment register’. If the version of the installed IDE matches the version on the last payment, and the register includes $OWNCOST of receipts over the prior three years, then the current version is launched with no network phoning at all – it’s “owned”. Phoning home would be done when the installed version isn’t “owned”, and would also update the payment register. Phoning home would also be done on a user-triggered software update check – if the user “owns” version OLD but the current version is NEW and there’s been a subscription gap, then version OLD would be retained and version NEW would be co-installed. Until such point as the user “owns” version NEW, they could only use it with an active subscription. Once the register shows they “own” version NEW, the OLD fallback would be deleted. If they stop subscribing, then NEW wouldn’t launch but OLD would still be available for use.

The payment register would, of course, need to be subject to appropriate cryptographic signing and verification, and the situation would be a bit more complex for the “All Tools” subscription rather than individual tool subscriptions, but those aren’t insurmountable obstacles.

This would also address the practical deadman-switch issues that other posters have for machines that need to maintain network isolation or are on year-long arctic expeditions or whatever exciting things keep them away from a network for months on end. If they toss an $OWNCOST lump sum over to JetBrains (and get a receipt in the register), they’re good to run with their current version as long as they need.

So, the tl;dr version:
* Having a deadman switch on software makes me want to run away screaming.
* I recommend a rent-to-own variation on the subscription model that uses the deadman switch as a secondary mechanism, only after a network-free “own” verification has failed.
* Having a deadman switch on software makes me want to run away screaming retractions of my recommendations of the software.
* For me, the subscription model would be MUCH less expensive. So, yay.
* Having a deadman switch on software makes me want to run away screaming disrecommendations of the software publisher on the grounds of “Does Evil”
* Personally, I want JetBrains to stay afloat and have sufficient funds to continue their work.
* Having a deadman switch on software makes me want to run away screaming.

I can definitely relate to the people who respond negatively. It’s very similar to the time I decided to fork out about 2.6K for Adobe CS6 and only a year later they came out with their subscription-based service. To this day I’m still getting bug fixes/updates for the CS6 which I think JetBrains should at the very least do in order to keep us “calm”.

In a perfect world I would expect companies to provide subscription based licensing fees based on the exact amount of hours/days/weeks/months we physically use the software/service. So, if for some reason I was only able to use the software during 8 months in a year… I would expect to have an additional 4 months when I “top-up” my licensing subscription.

One ?flaw? with the current licensing got me bad this year. On APR/2014 I renewed my PhpStorm license, and then again on JUL/2015… but to my surprise my license was going to expire again on APR/2016 and not JUL/2016!?

Well, for me and my company, this is a good move. I currently own IntelliJ Ultimate, Resharper Ultimate, and Webstorm. I imagine for many companies, the new model and pricing will be fine — especially for employees at those companies, where often the versions purchased were older, not compatible, and never upgraded.

I think if JetBrains can offer lower pricing for personal users (like Microsoft’s 365), then it will be a good deal all around.

Have you guys done any A/B testing on this pricing model? Maybe offer BOTH models for a bit, and see what you get.

The licensing model I don’t have a problem with. I just don’t like the reliance on an external server for checking the license.

A few years back, Jetbrains decided to get involved with April’s Fools Day. They released a version that had ‘clever’ popups and fun stuff. going on for the first half of the day.

It was the most annoying three hours I’ve ever spent at work. They didn’t repeat the trick as I suspect it p*ssed off so many people. They need to think very carefully about the effect a lost internet connection will have on their customers, and the ill will it will generate if people have the IDE generating popups every few minutes, or worse, shutting down altogether.

I’m for the subscription, but it needs a less intrusive way to manage it. Something that will allow people to carry on working for a reasonable amount of time, or permanently if the company goes bust.

Having recently switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ (mostly because the majority of our development team used IntelliJ and historically decided that it was somehow important to “check in” all the IntelliJ project files), I’m now looking to switch back to Eclipse.

There are many reasons:

1. Recently we invested several months modernizing our build system and dependency management solution. One nice side-effect was we unwound the requirement to “check in” IntelliJ files (which shouldn’t have happened in the first place). No longer being locked into IntelliJ or a specific version of IntelliJ is awesome. Members of the team can virtually work on any version and upgrade at their own pace. But it seems timing couldn’t be better! Now that Eclipse works out-of-the-box we now have a zero cost option!

2. IntelliJ support is terrible. We all expect defects in software. It can never be perfect. We certainly don’t mind paying for support (we expect our customers to pay for support as well), but the experience is terrible is when no support is ever offered, especially when you’re paying top-dollar for it. We’ve raised numerous bugs / defect reports with step-by-step examples on how to reproduce errors but they are never fixed. No matter how much information we provide, the actual fixing “supporting” of IntelliJ goes into /dev/null. JetBrains has a great system of reporting bugs, but is horrible at actually fixing them. It’s clear JetBrains invests virtually nothing in it. It’s simply an illusion of “support”.

eg: IntelliJ routinely fails to resolve the correct class during debug sessions, which makes debugging in IntelliJ very unreliable, issues I’ve never seen with Eclipse / Netbeans. (hence the motivation of “pinocchio code” – code that seems to be lying!).

3. Attempting to resolve issues in IntelliJ yourself is virtually impossible. Being open-source has provided zero benefit to us because there’s virtually zero documentation. I’d happily help resolve the class loading / resolving issues we’ve seen (and reproduced for JetBrains) then contribute them back to the community but it’s impossible to parse the code-base. Consequently we’re basically forced to wait for JetBrains to resolve issues, which we know for the past two years, is never.

4. While I hate the practice, having worked in a company that delays paying suppliers as long as possible, I can only image how many of us would be without an IDE when our finance group “forgets/delays” paying JetBrains one month, even for a yearly subscription. Imagine 1,000’s of developers suddenly without their “toolbox”. How many 1000’s of engineering hours does it take to enrage a developer community? Regardless of who’s fault it is subscription-based licensing opens the door to this kind of risk.

5. IntelliJ is very expensive. You only have to compare it to Microsoft Office 365 (subscription or otherwise) to see how ridiculously expensive it is, especially for the amount of engineering that goes into it.

6. Like all “Professional Trades-people”, I fundamentally object to having to “rent” my tools. I also fundamentally object to forcing the company I work for/with to “rent” the tools I need to do my job. For “one off jobs”, it may be ok, but for something we need day in day out, to support our own customers, it’s not ok.

7. Many of the key “ultimate” features are simply unreliable. eg: Perforce integration should never be trusted. IntelliJ tries to be very clever about the state of a change list outside of Perforce and this on numerous occasions has destroyed days of my work, not to mention those in our team. Anything outside a few files and you should use Perforce itself, never IntelliJ. Certainly never branch / integrate using it! Which means, why pay for it?

8. We know all to well how terrible the IntelliJ License Servers are. We’ve fought with them for years and eventually had to abandon them. Many developers decided to purchase their own personal license to avoid the pain (like myself). I can only image how much of a mess the subscription model is going to cause when simple on-premise licensing is fraught with pain. I can easily see an “IntelliJ Cloud Server” outage causing a huge part of the global Python / Java / Android development community to stop working.

Sadly the complete lack of support, poor development documentation, unreliable features and the thought of having to “rent” IntelliJ has forever eroded my confidence in JetBrains. Even the most ardent supporters / evangelists of IntelliJ that moved me to adopt it disagree with the new subscription-based licensing.

So this week we’ll start to look at new development tool options as “insurance” against the pending license changes. We can’t put ourselves in the position where by our IDE may not work due to someone / some server not being available. We certainly can’t put our own customers at risk either.

We’ll also renew our non-JetBrains code-review tool license for another year, simply to avoid the risk of JetBrains wanting to change their minds about UpSource.

— Pinocchio Code.

PS: We all know what comes after “subscription-based licensing”. Advertisement-based licensing. I can’t wait for that; having popups occurring as I’m writing code advertising random non-sense.

If you’re so unhappy with IntelliJ, I have no idea why you’re hanging around.

5. IntelliJ is very expensive. You only have to compare it to Microsoft Office 365 (subscription or otherwise) to see how ridiculously expensive it is, especially for the amount of engineering that goes into it.

I think you missed the point. Even when we try to contribute to the “community” to make it better, fix defects etc, even after “paying significantly for support”, we’re still losing. I’ve invested many hours in not only reproducing defects but also tracking down where they are coming from. If you stayed up at night doing this in your own time, ultimately providing benefit to the entire community, wouldn’t you be a little annoyed at the “lack of support”.

It’s non-sense to say to developers you’re getting a better deal, when demonstrably, at least in terms of support, we’re not.

JetBrains have produced a nice IDE. I mean, it’s really nice. There are some rough edges, but it’s still nice. When those rough edges prevent someone from solving a customer problem or in fact working at all, then shouldn’t one look at alternatives?

One should definitely not be shot down, told to go away or abused for highlighting imperfections that lead to increased developer cost.

As a developer who’s been coding for a couple of decades i’m gona call bullshit on this one; i am sure there’s an enormous amount of engineering involved in the intellij tools, all of them. They’re the best tools because of that hard work to build them and the continual hard work in maintaining them as things change and they do change all the time.

1-You should never add the IDE specific project files, be it eclipse or IntelliJ or whatever, use maven they both import from maven, and as far as I know so does netbeans.

2-Never had any issues with bugs, therefore never had to contact support so I can’t really tell about that, but the bug you say about class-reloading I never had the issue described while with eclipse it was daily and more than once a day.

3-Because I never had issues with bugs, I never tried to fix them so I can’t tell much about this.

4-About this one I too hate that practice, and yes it is a serious problem with the subscription model.

5-Seriously? Bullshit, go write your own IDE and then come back and tell us how easy it is (it is not), the previous replies also said a lot about this and I do agree with them.

6-The rent/subscription model while I don’t like it and prefer to have some license that does not expire, it can be a good thing if the price is lower (from what I can see that is not the case) and you don’t care much about not having the tools anymore, while I don’t like the idea of not being able to use any version if I stop paying, a lower price is tempting and it is a trade-off that would at least make me consider going for subscription.

7-Since I never used perforce I can’t tell, but if the ultimate features are not worth it why are you paying? Go for the community edition and don’t pay.

8-Are you talking about their own on-line servers or the on-premises server? I have tried it, while we did not have any big amout of licenses never had problems with it, same goes with their own on-line ones.

About your PS, did adobe do that? As far as I know they have a subscription model and are not doing any of that crap, I think you are being delusional.

One more thing, if you are so unhappy why are you still using it? Just go back to eclipse, netbeans or whatever you like.

2-Never had any issues with bugs, therefore never had to contact support so I can’t really tell about that, but the bug you say about class-reloading I never had the issue described while with eclipse it was daily and more than once a day.

This is what makes their method of bug fixing so unfortunate. Even if you can show them how to 100% reliably reproduce a bug, if it’s not something that enough people bump up against, it will never get fixed.

It’s unfortunate because when the software works, it’s amazing, but when you have to fight bugs, it’s less so. After a while it gets tiring to have to work around them and somewhat demoralizing to see release after release where the things that affect you the most are completely ignored.

PS: We all know what comes after “subscription-based licensing”. Advertisement-based licensing. I can’t wait for that; having popups occurring as I’m writing code advertising random non-sense.

Everyone’s biggest beef is that the software stops working when if you don’t pay the subscription. How about displaying an ad on the startup screen and on the status bar (occasionally) until the subscription is restored. And folk that don’t want to pay the subs can use it for free if they’re happy to put up with the ads. That way there is no need to stop the software from working at all.

This is assuming that Jetbrains decides not to restore the perpetual licence of course…

That’s not solving the issue that if JetBrains getting out of business in few years (I mean how anyone can guarantee that it won’t happen), then we all would be forced to other IDEs because there is simply no way to keep it working. So I can understand why people would want to switch to IDE “X” now at their convenience, to avoid this risk and be much more proficient in some other IDE in few years than to invest that time in JetBrains products.

If JetBrains fails then I’ll move to a new IDE if/when it happens. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to curtail my productivity now for something that may or may not happen in five or six years time.

I’m pretty good with going to a subscription, since this is a fast-moving industry and staying with the newest toolset is always helpful. That said, I think there are a few things you could do to make it easier for some of us:

1. Since I am an existing customer, your discount entitles me to “All Products” for $149/yr. If I jump on now, and a few years down the line you decide to bump this up (to, say, $249/yr), I may suddenly become unable to afford this. As a result, I’ll be unable to run the software at all, including versions released during the time I was a paying customer. And this thought is very discouraging. So how about a guarantee that any customer who signs up for any of these packages will be able to lock in their prices until they cancel or switch to a different subscription package?

2. This is related to #1. Just as you recently released CLion, you may introduce new products in the future that I may or may not ever need. Will the “All Products” toolbox price increase as you add products? That would not be so exciting for everybody, since everybody needs a different subset of the tools. How about a guarantee that the price won’t ever increase for the “All Products” toolbox? Or, a way of allowing someone to keep their price and stay with their current subset, what was once “All Products”?

3. Regarding “All Products”, I have used many of your tools from time to time, including IDEA, AppCode, PyCharm, RubyMine, WebStorm, ReSharper, and dotPerformance, but not always all of them at once. In fact I probably only use two or three of them in any given month. How about an option for a price point a bit lower than the full package that would give us an option to activate up to three (or two) of these tools for use during any given month?

4. With regard to the actual tools, sometimes we would like access to previous functionality as we maintain old code. Either allow us to download and use older versions of any product that we are subscribed to, or never drop features. (For example, 10 years down the line I might need to write a patch for a project written for ASP.NET MVC 2 on Visual Studio 2008. Please somehow make sure that ReSharper will still be able to help me in that case.)

I realise that I had misread the pricing model, I didn’t realise the one cost would include all of the intellij suite.

With that in mind…. i’d have no problem changing.

The fact that it wouldn’t work if i stop working is still stings a little but then so does my Adobe cloud, Apple Developer, Corp gmail, Confluence & jira, Bitbucket, Office, Dropbox pro [the list goes on] licences… and with some of those i loose the content if i stop paying too.

I read lot of complains concerning the subscription model.
When I compare with what I was doing, every year, I buy a new licence for my product, which is somewhere a subscription…
Concerning subscription, I think it’s what we will view in a not so far future. Many other editors are doing it, we tend to subscribe to a service with as many tools as possible instead of buying a tool. But it may be a bit too early for customers to think like it, you may be a bit too early
In my opinion, it’s a good thing to make a budget at the beginning of year for all services I need to subscribe, and choose which I really need.
Good things I see right now :
– I have a subscription for all tools, which is a good thing as I didn’t buy all products and I’m still using vim for Ruby and Python. I’m just an Intellij user but it may change for the future with the all in one subscription
– I don’t have to think when I have to buy a new licence, it comes on the fly with my subscription
– I can rent a tool for 3 month, just the time of a project, instead of buying it, which is cheaper

Bad things :
– No possibility to buy a tool for life. It may be a good idea to have the possibility to buy an old version with no updates/support
– Same price for buying and renting. If I take an engagement with you, I’d like to get a refund, let’s say $69/year instead of $89 if a buy a new licence.

Hope it helps, but I think you’re on the right way, just maybe a bit early for customers. Hope the services you provide will improve with this new approach…

I use R# tools at work and a private copy of PhpStorm at home for past-time programming activity.

I like PhpStorm and thought about updating it (since I make no money out of that I need to justify this expense) but with the new model this would kill any ambition using it as I can’t justify updating it every year.

I completely understand that the model might make sense for business (although I am unsure how our decisions at work towards R# will shift with the new model) it practically drives me away from your tools with that move. Which is a pity :/

Disappointing and unworkable for the casual developer who don’t use your toolset heavily…

Unfortunately you’ve lost a customer with this unless you have the option to pause/suspend your access. I’m not paying for a full month when I might do 2 days work and then not have any time for 3-4 weeks!!

My standard upgrade price now falls under “special offer” and not something I used to pay as regular. Meaning that I will have to pay $99 for the next trip?! 3 times as the initial price?! Seriously!? Lure people into new payment system in such way is really disrespectful.

Guys, give them some time to work through the details. I wouldn’t want customers dictating how to run my company, and I’d want to think through the options in a careful, and thoughtful way. I think letting them do so will allow for a better resolution to the whole situation.

No, customers don’t get delve into the internal policies of the company and get to tell them how to run the show. Customers’ demands may influence what is offered, but they don’t get to decide what will happen–the company decides that. A small, but important difference. And yes, customers can vote with their feet and choose something else if they don’t like the terms.

Aside from the license changes, my main concern is, that I will technically no longer be able to use the software.

I use my personal licence (yearly paying PyCharm customer since 2010) also on my Office Pc. The current license terms, which will not change (afaik) does allow this. Our office network is not connected to the internet, therefore it is not possible to “activate” the license on this Pc and I am forced to stop using PyCharm.

I already wrote my concerns to sales (ticket #182723) but was answered, that a connection to JetBrains is required every 30 days without showing a way how to use PyCharm in my case.

Question: If I choose to take advantage of the ‘current customer’ offer, and later let the subscription lapse… what happens to my current perpetual licenses to IDEA and Resharper? Are those licenses void once I convert to a subscription?

As others have suggested I like the model whereby you earn a perpetual license after so much time as a subscriber. For example Safari books gives you download tokens for every month of your subscription that you can use to permanently own the titles you want.

Maybe JetBrains could do the same. Each month subscription gives you so much credit towards a perpetual license that you can cash in. I guess the downside is it complicates things. But this might be enough to entice users to accept subscription and maybe the ones resisting it will eventually realize they like it.

Just wanted to get my vote in for no subscription. I will rent a movie, but I won’t rent my tools. Rentals are for things you don’t need often, despite what Adobe and such might believe. I have an Adobe free workflow now and I can have a Jetbrains free workflow too. Best of luck!

If you feel that, in order to be profitable and stay in business, that you need to go this route, so be it.

But I do encourage you to consider retaining the current approach for individual licenses – where an individual can purchase the license (sort of like a community edition) and choose to purchase the upgrades. But business will need to use the new model. Might some small companies get subscriptions pretending to be individuals? Sure – but if they become successful, they will end up hiring more people and won’t be able to continue that way.

Even better, individuals who might want to use your tools to write something for a local community/charity/etc. group can do so. Especially since, if they use it at work, they might want to use it at home as well for these projects. A community type license makes this all possible without anyone violating the business license.

I’ve been an enthusiastic user of Jetbrains products for 15 years now. I use ReSharper and IDEA mostly these days, but I’ve bought and used PyCharm, PHPStorm, and RubyMine in the past. I’ve also evangelized the use of your products at every company I work for, typically leading to many additional sales for Jetbrains.

If you change your licensing to a subscription-only model where the ability to use the software at the end of the subscription is lost, my relationship with your company will end. I will recommend that employers, clients, and colleagues look for tool vendors with licensing models less punitive to independent developers.

But the yearly subscription price for 1 product is equivalent to the entire cost under the previous model.
Nothing really changed, and the previous purchase is now a 1-year rental.
(In regards to the mentioned benefit of being able to pick certain months, do developers really cease coding for an entire month?
That’s why we look straight to the annual subscription price.)

The decent price reduction comes from the new $20/month for all Jetbrains products.
Can their not be a sizeable price reduction for those that will subscribe to just 1 product?

During past 3 years I purchased 3 JetBrains products + multiple renewals. Price is reasonable and I know that even if one or another technology becomes not my primary source of income, I can stop renewing and have slightly outdated IDE for doing maintenance / small fixes. And that’s nice.

But I have no plans to even start paying for product which will be artificially taken away after say 1 year. None of my household things have this artificial “expiration”. And none of my daily job tools have this (unless it relies on some remote computational resources). So please reconsider your plans.

Lovely… not. I understand that you guys (Jetbrains) want to have a semi-predictable income-stream. However, considering I have used and paid for IntelliJ for over a decade and convinced countless other developers to switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ, this is a a hard pill to swallow.

I could continue on and write a TLDR, but rest assured, it’s harder to convince me (and many of the companies I worked for or developers I worked with) to “rent” my tools on a monthly basis. Despite the fact that I anyway paid for IntelliJ every year, when I see other software tools that I might find useful but that try push me into a “you can just use it as long as you pay”-model it has never happened that I subscribed.

Exactly. The best way to have a predictable income stream is to make the upgrade purchases worthwhile. If IntelliJ 15 has compelling new functionality over IntelliJ 14 (for example), then the vast majority will upgrade.

Agree with you. Each year has given me new stuff that I wanted to have – so I paid for it. Say one day I might work for a business that is a bit short on cash during some rough years, guess what will go? My IntelliJ-license, because that one is rented and we could stop paying for it anytime. Now… on the other hand. If the license is paid, I can continue use IntelliJ nn.n until the business feels like it can buy a new license.

After all, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that times aren’t always as “rainbow-farting unicorns”-like as it is right now.

If Jetbrains really wants to stick to this plan I would STRONGLY suggest some sort of “if you paid the license for X months, you can use the version you’re using right now indefinitely, even if you stop paying”.

For example: I “rent” IntelliJ for 18 months, in 18 months I (or the employer I work for) does not (for whatever reason) prioritise to continue paying for IntelliJ. However, since I paid IntelliJ for over one year I get to keep the version that I currently have installed on my computer and keep using it. Naturally, I won’t be able to update to the next major version because I haven’t paid for the tool, but I at least get to keep IDEA 16 (which I guess would be the version available in 18 months from now).

I understand all the negative sentiment and I can relate to some of it.
My only real issue with this licensing model is that my software might stop working at any moment because of network connectivity issues or if jetbrains stopped operating. If jetbrains could address these issues that would be great.

In just a few days, JetBrains has lost years of developer mind share and done almost irreversible damage to the company. The smartest thing JetBrains can do at this point is just accept that they are going to lose more than 80% of their loyal customers unless they continue with the current perpetual licenses.

Years of research by business analysts have indicated that the single most important question you can ask of customers (roughly speaking) is “Would you recommend us to a friend?” If the customers answer yes, then they are called Promoters, and if they answer no the are called Detractors. These two numbers are used to calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Companies with high NPS scores are almost always successful and growing by delighting their customers and turning them into advocates. Companies with low NPS scores are almost always in decline and have customers which actively speak negatively about them. JetBrains, please have your management read “The Ultimate Question 2.0”

It is clear that in this new risky licensing scheme, JetBrains has put its profits over making its customers happy. In fact this new licensing does exactly the opposite of making its customers happy, it turns them into an angry mob. The vast majority hate renting software.

IntelliJ is only marginally better than NetBeans or Eclipse (and even that is debatable). JetBrains is in no position to start demanding we rent their software. My projects are all maven based now, and it is almost trivial to switch from IntelliJ to NetBeans or Eclipse. Unless the perpetual licensing is continued, that is exactly what I’ll be doing.

I do not develop software products that are dependent on JetBrains’ or any other IDE vendor’s short-term license policies and highly insecure future pricing policies. I regularly buy backward compatible software upgrades with perpetual licenses if the creator of the software has convinced me that the new features of his product are worth buying it.

I switched from IntelliJ to the commercial MyEclipse edition in 2005. Later I switched to NetBeans and the free Eclipse edition, and I switched back to IntelliJ a couple of years ago because JetBrains started to offer lower prices for their innovative IntelliJ IDEA product.

But I have used Eclipse and NetBeans without hassle to develop commercial software products for a couple of years. And I do not fear to use it again. As far as I can see, most of the German job advertisements for Java developers require a good knowledge of Eclipse.

I have sold all my licenses of my Adobe software products because Adobe has switched to an expensive subscription based software licensing model and thus invited so many competitors to develop and sell exceptional new graphics and photo design software products for very low prices, especially for the Mac OS X platform.

I found you in an effort to get away from Adobe’s straying away from perpetual licensing software to more evenly balance out their revenue stream. Renting software that expires when you stop feeding the beast jacks with my wallet and my mind significantly. I found JetBrains searching for alternatives to Adobe’s web products since their licensing change. I WAS extremely happy to have found you and have been reviewing the WebStorm and PHPStorm products and looking to make the switch. Now it looks like you have went to the rent software scheme and you are NO LONGER AN OPTION for me.

The reason this doesn’t work for me and perhaps others like me is that I will be working on web development part time. I may go months without working on the web products as I will get pointed to other more pressing items as I wear many hats. When I return to fix/update/improve the web and find that the software I paid for no longer will work, I will freak the hell out. I would much rather have the option to pay for updates when my income allows it, not because it works better for you. As a result of making it work better financially for you, you lose me entirely. Which is a shame as I was really looking forward to getting involved with your product. I found you. I will find another like you that doesn’t rent software and choose them instead.

However, if you do happen to come to your senses and dump the rental BS, please contact me. I have credit card in hand and am ready to purchase. Not rent..

I have been using IDEA for very long time at almost all companies I worked for. I also was recommending IDEA to my colleagues and I love the product.

As a developer I am totally interested in JetBrains continuing to develop their line of products. I am not using all of them, but can tell that for Java and PHP, IDEA and PhpStorm are the best IDE.

So radical change in licensing must be caused by serious reasons (due to high risk of loosing customers) and I am really concerned about JetBrains future. Do you think that it is THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP YOUR COMPANY IN BUSINESS?

If you are not 100% sure about this, please introduce subscription as an option. Also please consider all good points that were made about availability/reliability of internet connections and subscription validation servers. None of companies wants a dependency that can put it’s business at risk. None.

I really hope that prudent decision will make it possible for us to enjoy JetBrains products in the future as much as we enjoying them now.

People here seem to be comparing JetBrains to Adobe. I’m not sure it’s a fair comparison (for Adobe)
I’ve been working with Adobe Lightroom for years. Occasionally, I’d switch to photoshop for extra retouching. I’ve tried many other tools over the years and I am yet to find a tool that would aid my workflow as Lightroom. Considering how expensive photoshop standalone license was, I never could own it. When the Photographer CC offer came, I saw an opportunity to be able to get both tools for a bit more than what I used to pay for lightroom standalone.
Now lets look at JetBrains. I used to use PhpStorm. Now I am using IntelliJ. After the last upgrade (using v15 EAP now), I wonder if future upgrades will be of any value to me, since the only added feature I notice myself using is the Find Preview. I am happy that I still have the perpetual license because I’d be rather unhappy if I was forced to keep paying for upgrades I don’t use. And I’d probably move on to the free/cheaper alternatives in that case. As a regular JEE (we’re still on java 1.6) java dev, there’re plenty of very similar alternatives, unlike in the case of Adobe.
Maybe what would make sense is having more product offerings. like there’s IntelliJ community edition (free/limited) and ultimate edition (everything + kitchen sink). How about adding extra tiers between the free and the kitchen sink. You can make Ultimate Ed. to be the all-encompassing / latest-n-greatest and keep it on the rent model and have 1-2 intermediate options that could be on lifetime license.

Wow! That’s an excellent idea, guys! I whole-heartedly support it.
I need a new IJ every other year anyway. And I don’t want to check all these feature lists to make a decision.
It’s amazing that you’ll be able to focus on quality of your products even more. As some long-standing bugs annoy people a lot: WI-674 or IDEA-101576.

I’m still on IntelliJ 12 and very happy with it. I don’t need and I’m not missing the “killer features” of 13, 14 and 15 (still yet), so the subscription model wouldn’t fit to my needs and would be very expensive for me. I liked the previous changes at the license model (buy one version and get updates for one year including major updates). This makes it cheeper and nobody has the problem that he may bought the version at the false time (short before a new release). Perfect, but caused by the missing “killer features” I hadn’t even the need to upgrade to this offer… (but I would of course use it, when I could need the new features).

I support one aspect of the proposal wholeheartedly: More focus on fixing bugs rather than new features. A flawlessly working core application is more important. For example, in WebStorm autocompletion still is quite a mess – it brings up *tons* of completely useless suggestions even though my code is 100% filled with JSDoc type information. It brings up everything and the kitchen sink, and often shows wrong suggestions that definitely are not available on that variable. The only “use case” I have for the current autocompletion is to check what ridiculous suggestion it makes this time and not for serious work.

In this context, a feature that lets the programmer see what goes on internally in WebStorm, how it gets its ideas about types and completions, would help a lot. It’s always a lot trial-and-error – does it get this type right, or should I add another inline JSDoc type comment? Where did the IDE get the idea property M is available on that variable when it clearly isn’t (the code throws an error when I try to access “M”)?

I don’t like new subscription licence idea, and I can explain why current licensing model is more attractive for me:

1) IF Jetbrains don’t add new features to their IDE – I don’t need to buy an upgrade, I can simply use the one I own already. Therefore with current license Jetbrains are encouraged to develop and improve their product, to encourage upgrades. With subscription they can rest on their current product and simply collect subscription fees, even without doing ANY development at all. You simply can’t stop paying monthly/yearly fee and continue using it with subscription model.

2) IF Jetbrains change IDE drastically (ie interface is revamped and becomes less intuitive for me, or any other changes are implemented that I personally don’t like for any reason), with current license I can use older version without any limitation. With new licence I either am forced to pay and use new product even if I don’t like changes, or I pay subscription and keep using “old” version.

This means that I simply should keep my current Ultimate license and continue using it after license runs out (I am eligible to do su under current license), and not ever renew it under new licensing model. IF for some reason I later decide that I want to use newest version, I simply buy new “monthly” license, leaving old one untouched. When “new” runs out – I alway have a licensed tool to fall back to, and it will cost me nothing.

Please don’t make the switch to a subscription model. Although I am likely to annually renew my licenses, it’s sure nice to have the option not to. A subscription model is a really bad fit for IDEs. Definitely add me as a “NO” vote.

We are a Java and PhP that support and enhance a 3rd party software package. I made the switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA over a year ago and have been extremely pleased with it. I have brought up changing our PhP development over to PHPStorm, but will have to backtrack if this pricing model goes into effect.
Oh well, back to Eclipse to find out what “Mars” has to offer me.

This model may work out and even make sense for corporations. In my opinion this model probably makes senses for organizations that are in the business of developing software and managing software development processes.

As a contractor this model does not work out so well. My business is to be productive in providing solutions to problems. The tools I use can change depending on the problems I need to solve. I can be productive in many IDE—it does not have to be intellij. I switch from eclipse to Intellij, because I feel it gives me an edge in my productivity over other developers. So why does this model not work for me? If I am not using Intellij, I am not going to be paying the subscription (Makes sense right). I have a ton of what I call ramp-up projects (In Intellij as well as other IDEs and tools). Doing this allows me to be productive for a customer or potential customer quickly. I don’t want to pay a subscription to simply get a project up an running and then within days or even hours not need that subscription. Another case of needing “to rent” for a short time is when I simply want to ramp up a project to try something out. I don’t want to have to rent to do that. I realize that my “old—not up-to-date” IDE will not have all the latest and greatest, but my project works as I left it and if I need more I will make the decision at that point to buy it. Bottom line as a contractor I want to own my license and know I can work with old projects without having to pay a fee. Something to think about: As a contractor I can (and have) influenced a lot of Businesses and individual developers to switch to intellij. As I said before, your model probably work for businesses that I may influence towards intellij, but if I am not using intellij then I am not going to be influencing anyone to use intellij. This is just my reason for not liking the new pricing model. I think for many individuals this model will not work for them.

I won’t rehash what everyone else has written, but bottom line is a subscription model is unacceptable to me, especially one where the product stops working if I forget to renew/credit card expires/don’t want to renew.

I’m a long term IDEA user, and have converted many colleagues from Eclipse; I’ve persuaded people to buy a license, and even jokingly said things like “it’s a tax you’re paying to use a great product like IDEA and not have to use Eclipse”. I’ve been a raving fan and advocate of IDEA since I started using it, but now I’m about to go download Eclipse to see if it has gotten any better over the years.

I’m head of a small development team in a business here. We’ve got around 7 licenses for IDEA. For the record, I don’t like the subscription model at all. Mostly around the phone home/online requirement. I agree with many other posters that software tools need to stay working even for old software projects many years after the last active phase. Having my teams tools stop working due to outside factors (eg, JetBrains going under) is not acceptable.

If this goes ahead, we’ll be buying one last upgrade, and then we’ll have to select an alternative. If you need a larger income, consider increasing license costs, or a yearly update subscription without the self terminating ‘feature’.

Oh, sorry. I apologize. I posted just one answer before reading Your answer. I promise that I try to avoid covering that here. I understand that it’s an unfair debate, because, for various reasons that I leave unlisted, You really are not in a position to answer fully. So, again, my mistake. I’ll try to choose my answers, let’s say, more considerately.

I have a question. If, in the near future, I want to swap from a plan to another like “All Products”, would I lose the offer* for existing users? It’d be horrible if I need to decide now a bigger plan just for not losing a nice discount.

Looks like you’ve heard this a lot already but I still have to let you know that I disagree with this proposed change. I rent things that I use once in a blue moon or to try them out before I BUY them. I definitely will not rent something that I use on an almost daily basis, especially when there are plenty of non rental alternatives available.

Moving to a subscription based model is bad enough but having the software stop working if it’s not renewed is completely unacceptable. I see no reason why you can’t offer both licensing models so users can pick whichever one they prefer. I also understand you need to make money but after reading a lot of other comments it looks like most people wouldn’t have a problem paying more for a perpetual license.

If you go through with this change my company will be making one last upgrade and staying on that version until we decide on a new IDE. Based on other comments it looks like a lot of other people will be doing the same. Good luck if you decide to go through with this, I think you will need it.

You should allow customers to select between subscription and life time license when they buy the product. I guess I will quit if you change my license to subscription. I have bought a life time license and now it is going to be stolen. It is unacceptable.

As someone whose workplace provides IntelliJ licensing, I only want to pay for occasional personal use, hardly even as a hobby. Probably to play around with various languages and technologies. Learn C++ maybe. Fewer than 10 hours a month.

£16 a month for all products or £8 for IntelliJ is cheap enough to make it worthwhile. £150 is tough to swallow and I’ve only bought IntelliJ two days ago, months after I added it to my wishlist. Was I annoyed to only find out about the subscription after the purchase? Definitely, but that was my own fault.

Just please give people the option to easily upgrade single-app subscriptions to the full one without incurring unnecessary costs. I wanted this feature for other software subscriptions and (ostensibly) it isn’t an obvious thing to provide.

Other than that, this is a great idea. It seems to give JetBrains more control over their finances and it definitely frees developers from being locked in. I don’t understand some of the ‘vocal’ criticism around here, because this is common sense. If you can’t pay, just use a free IDE until you can pay again. If you’re out of work, surely it’s not that difficult to find the time to learn another IDE. It only takes a few hours to be reasonably productive. If you can’t do that OR find a job, you’re in the wrong field.

I’ve started to use PHPStorm a few days ago, using the free evaluation copy. I really like it a lot and was about to purchase a license. I would most likely renew the license once a year for the discounted price.

However, the new subscription model is totally unacceptable for me. I don’t want a software which stops working after I decided to stop the payments. Also, I don’t agree with the “phone home” requirement every 30 days.

So please, JetBrains, reconsider this move. Please keep the licensing fees as they are now, and you’ll get me as another happy customer of PHPStorm.

i dont get any benefits for us, we are small team and we are growing and now we have 10 resharpers and 5 intellijs.
first time investment was 249e*10 + 499e*5 = 4985e and after year we will buy update for new version which 119e*10 + 299e*5 = 2685e, after 5 years it is 15725e.
with new model it is: 239e*10*5 + 319*5*5 = 19925e… and on top of that we will lose licenses when we will stop paying (for example when we dont need new version for long running project). i really don’t see any benefits for us as customers. we will pay every year as we are paying with existing model and we will only lose with this new model. so please change prices so they can compensate our lose of license, or keep existing model.

for simplification i omitted discounts for existing 1y upgrade or time/volume discount for new subscription model, or existing customer discount.

It might even sound good/better for the first year then or for how long they are willing to sub without lapsing, but after that… Remember, the “after that” part will very likely be the longer time span by far.

I don’t understand why an upgrade requires new features? Improved performance, stability, etc is a feature and most devs would be willing to pay for this. Apple has done this before with OS X, some updates were payed for by the customer, others were free. But more importantly, when you stated you’d like to focus more on quality instead of features, I read that as “wooing you customers is getting hard, so we’d like to stop”. I would definitely like Jetbrains to focus on performance and stability, however that doesn’t mean I don’t want any new features.

Another point, when you subscribe to software it’s usually cheaper than buying outright. Unity, for example, is about 70% off of the perpetual license cost. Why? Because I’m only leasing the license. Using this same (already accepted) pricing model you can see you’re individual tools are priced too high, and your package deal is priced too low (by about $30/mo).

This change likely makes great sense for a company that buys your products, but from an individuals perspective I’m finding it hard to stomach the idea of not owning my tools. Also, the idea of my tools “phoning home” is disturbing. As you should already (hopefully) know, sometimes devs work with sensitive source code. I find it hard to believe that you will be able to pass any inspection allowing the use of your tools on sensitive networks (like govs for instance) if it requires hitting a licensing server.

In all, if a perpetual license is not made available, with future upgrades made available for a reasonable price (your current model), I will likely move back to Sublime Text, or find a new product.

Well, we will see if they are actually listening or its just a marketing stunt. We will see if they just give you the choice of choose the licensing model, or just force you into subscription. I dont like this forced subscription model even if they drop the prices to a 10% of the perpetual licensing.

Listening is by far not enough. Action matters. And JetBrains will be measured.

To be not misunderstood: I have valid licenses for my products and i am sure, that i will be able to use this licenses for at least two or three additional years. Only some breaking changes in OS or Java may stop me at this point.

I’m absolutely willing to pay for a license. You may raise the price to some degree and i wouldn’t care if the product has still it’s value.

But i will never go with a subscription for my bread and butter tools. There’s too much which could deny me from using the software i need for my job… Broken internet, disappearing servers, expiring credit card, owner change of JetBrains and whatever else might or might not be imaginable.

A subscription is fine for low priority stuff like Spotify, Netflix etc. It’s not critical if something goes wrong there. But for business critical software it is not an option for me. It will not sell and so i’m sad to say that after roughly ten years JetBrains will lose me as a paying customer.

Listening is by far not enough. And i hope, if you don’t change your mind as a company, that you’ll learn it the hard way that subscriptions are a bad thing when it comes to business critical software. I really hope that. Not because i’m a bad guy – but because i *want* to pay for good software – but i do not want and do not accept to be put on the needle and beeing forced to pay to do my work.

Just to be clear: Even if the subscription would cost me only 5 USD per month i wouldn’t go with that. It’s not the price, it’s not the money – it’s the reliability and the access to the tool i need daily and that i use at least 10 hours per day.

Price doesn’t matter for me as long as the revenue of usage is higher than the costs. Until now that works.

I don’t really get why you need to change model. You already had a remarkably brilliant scheme where users were incentivized to pay annually. The model where you buy the license for say $100, pay half that per year for updates, and have to pay backwards for any periods to cover up until today makes it a poor deal not to pay annually. It takes more than two years of no updates to make it a good deal not to pay on a continuous basis. In effect, a subscription scheme that still leaves you with a working, albeit outdated, product if you stop paying, but still leaving a way in back to subscription. Fantastic. So why change?

What is attractive with the new subscription model is that it allows us to get a range of products we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. (Too many, in fact.) My suggestions would be:

Keep the old model, but add a few multiproduct packages. Say, an “everthing and the kitchen sink” package for $800 purchase and $400 a year (for corporations, half that for personal use). An “everything except dotnet” package for $400 purchase and $200 a year. And the old individual products as before.

If you decide to go with the full subscription model anyway, please don’t have that thing where we lose our lower prices once we let the subscription lapse and want back in. That one thing is certain to cause serious heartburn and the occasional myocardial when we experience the annual decision angst. That’s just psychological manipulation, pure and simple.

Stop working product politics is unacceptable for me. Sorry but if you go that way, I’ll have to say sorry Eclipse or Netbeans. As Andrey Mikhaylov wrote:I can’t work because I have no money to renew my IDE license. I can’t renew my IDE license because I can’t earn money.
Do not go that way…

I don’t think piracy will stop by you going this route.
I do think you will lose customers to other free IDE’s. Paying for an excellent product is one thing. Being held to ransom is something else. Everything, after all, is replaceable

My preference is very much aligned with the majority here, to be able to pay for a license that is never taken away (no subscription requirement, please!!). I’ll upgrade when I feel the features are worth paying for an upgrade.

I’m paying yearly for updates, but the problem with this change is the following:

If I now stop paying I can still use the IDEs. With a subscription service I can’t do that. The yearly cost is the same as I already has a licence and I continue paying year after year, but I will loose access when I stop paying.

For this to be a good thing in my eyes the yearly cost for a single IDE would have to be decreased to compensate for the lost rights to use it when the license runs out.

This is however a great thing for those who need most of the tools, but for those who only need 1-2-3-4 of the tools the price will increase or the rights to use it will not be what they used to be.

I actually recommended the JetBrains products 20 minutes ago, and when I saw this now I actually got a bit sad.

I personally would go for the “All products” if I could get it for a yearly price that is a bit lower then the current € 149 /year, even tho I mostly just use one IDE and the others are just for fun. The only one I need is PhpStorm (currently € 49/month) but I would happily pay ~€ 100/year just to have access to the other stuff just for fun. I currently use Netbeans the few times I use C.

A 2-3-4 pack offer would also be nice for those who are not interested in all of them but just want to pay a little bit more to have some of the others to play around with.

Jetbrains products have always gotten my warmest recommendations and will continue to do so as long as the yearly subscription cost is lower than be for to compensate for the lost rights when the subscription ends.

It is not about caving, its about providing a compromise that works for both those that benefit from the subscription and those who want software ownership.

I am against the subscription model because it doesn’t work well for me, but I don’t want to see it canned – I can see its advantages to people like yourself and hope that you get that – However, those who advocate for the subscription model shouldn’t fight those who have problems with it, we should all strive to see a change we can all be happy with.

We all love the software, I hope that JetBrains can do something that works for not only you, but me, and everyone else.

Agreed. I personally never buy tools/games/etc that have regular subscription fees. If I am going to buy Jetbrains software in the future, then I need to know that my license will continue on for as long as I want to use it. Others may want the regular updates, but I don’t.

To be honest I support this change. I have a personal dev licence (my company refuses to pay for the devs to have r# as the beancounters have no understanding of what it is).

I can’t afford to buy the £100+ upgrades every year and a bit (I bought r# just after a release so my 1y never lands on the right side of a new version). I can afford £7ish a month as it is less noticeable than a large outgoing from my bank (also easier to hide from the misses!).

The license change is a bad idea.
I work at a company where I do all my work off-site. At the premise I have only limited access to the internet. There is no way the client will accept a firewall opening for a license server (and as I am an consultant, there will be no license server in the network).

please revert this bad bad decision, before I am forced to go back to eclipse.

The fundamental drawback of losing access to a development tool due to subscription expiry/non-renewal OR through failure to phone home due to security issues OR financial failure of JetBrains OR unfavourable acquisition; has too many risks for us to continue using the tools on critical projects. That is why we invest in perpetual licences and upgrades, without time restrictions or dependencies. Full stop.

Agreed. My current employer (300k employees) and previous employer (40k employees) both have the same policy. Namely, subscription software is too risky to build their development practice on for the reasons Rob S stated above. Sure, it might be easier for a small developer/shop to “try” the software for a period using a monthly charge rather than the large upfront cost of a full license. In the long run though, the “small” shops are just as sensitive to the long-term costs and risk involved that cause bigger companies to ban subscription software. Beware alienating all but the most indecisive developers who just want to try your software for a short period.

Unlike many commenters here, I am a brand new prospect when it comes to IntelliJ. I had been using Eclipse for a while, on personal projects while I brought my Java up to speed but realised I needed to look around. Recently a project has come up which I need to pick an IDE for, and stick with – and my employer is willing to pay a license. I was weighing up IntelliJ vs. Eclipse, have both installed, and was leaning towards IntelliJ to the point I nearly bought a subscription. Having seen this recent announcement, I have made my decision. I’m going Eclipse, for good, bad or indifferent. Maybe IntelliJ is great, and there are probably a whole bunch of nice things in there I’ll now never get to find and experience. Subscription is a total no-no for me. I bought Photoshop prior to the Creative Cloud era, and that money is the last that Adobe will ever see from me. Subscription is bad for those of us that just want one specific IDE/Application and are not interested in the wider tool set. I was nearly a customer, but I’m not participating in this model, so … adieu Jetbrains.

For companies like Adobe where their software used to be way out of the price range for individuals, I can understand the move, it would reduce piracy.
However your IDE’s have always been reasonably priced and well worth the money, I can understand the “Toolbox” pricing for polyglot developers and teams but overall I think subscriptions will give more cause to ignore innovation vs “Upgrade to get these new features”.

I bought the PHPStorm product about 5 years ago for occasionally editing some HTML, Dart, and PHP. I paid something like $USD 59 on a sale you had, originally, and then paid another $49 for an upgrade a couple years later. Since then, I contemplated upgrading, but did not want to spend much for something I do not use every day. When I read the announcement (of your proposed pricing for subscription-model), I COULD NOT BELIEVE HOW EXPENSIVE IT WAS GOING TO BE!!! IF it was $25-30/year, I would consider it, since I have spent on average not quite that much per year, but when I read that you want MORE THAN I PAID IN 5 YEARS, EVERY YEAR!!… FORGET IT! Time for me to move to another editor it seems.

It’s not the price that gets me. This is quality software and I’m willing to pay for it. It’s that I can’t have the #1 most important tool in my toolbox be SaaS. I need to be certain I’ll have it whenever I need it once I pay. The prospect of losing access to this tool if I miss a monthly payment will make me switch to an open source IDE, like many others have mentioned. I’ve spoken to a dozen of my coworkers that use JetBrains products and said they will switch IDEs as well.

I’m continuing to use IntelliJ and WebStorm until all of this pans out. If JetBrains has half the business sense as they do software sense, they won’t change the pricing model. Rest assured though, the day I have to pay my first month of the proposed pricing model is the day I switch back to NetBeans/Eclipse/VIM/Sublime.

I can see that some people and companies would prefer a subscription, and some wouldn’t. I (and my company – actually government) wouldn’t. Our funding model simply doesn’t work like that. We have to react quickly (hours or days) but it can take months to get any spending approved, so a subscription model can’t work. We need the tools ready, whether we’re currently using them or not.

So I’d suggest that you try to enable both subscription and perpetual licence models.

I am a freelancer and I pay for my tools by my one. I buy tools because I don’t like others. Its not always because of productivity. When I do my work in less time, my customer is the beneficiary.
So, I use Intellij since Version 7 because I liked more then other IDEs. I don’t need a full tool stack and I cannot use that. Not here, behind a companies firewall with an ntlm proxy with a lot of restrictive rules.
I assume, the licence server will not be available either.

But I liked jrebel as well and now they have changed ther pricing model more often than their software version. They removed the single developer license and now the tool is so expensive that I will not buy it anymore and I am not trusting that company anymore.

Keep in mind: Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

The simple fact that you are considering moving to this “rent” model of software is a bit shocking given the extensive backlash when other software companies tried it. Just look at the 10’s if not 100’s of thousands of angry, no, infuriated customers Adobe created when they switched to the “pay or quits” ransom license model.

JetBrains, however, is not Adobe. JetBrains is a player in the IDE software for the code writing market, but you are not THE dominating force. In fact, let’s focus on that – You are in the market of IDE’s for Code Writers. Code Writers! Your customers will disappear faster than a Twinkie at a Weight Watchers meeting. An Open Source IDE will quickly assume dominance and take your place. Either a new one will appear or an existing one will be updated to be on par with, and possibly become far superior to, what you were offering.

The “Pay or it Quits” payment model is not liked. It is not appreciated. Users tend to feel betrayed by it and your user base will have a negative opinion of you going forward, always looking for alternatives. Moving forward you can expect negativity and backlash from upset customers, as you are starting to see. Is this what you are hoping to achieve?

Hum. If I understand, today I pay 49€ for my yearly licence renewal for phpStorm, and tomorrow I will pay 99€ and if I stop paying, phpStorm will stop working… I renew my licence every year so, even if I really really don’t like it, I can close eyes on the subscription model. But the price gap is not acceptable. I think I will reconsider my licence renewal and quit JetBrains products…

After having thought things out, I must add that this is a tough decision, but now I understand why you’ve made it.

I no longer think that subscription-based model will stagnate your product development, because JetBrains must innovate just to survive in a constantly evolving IDE market. After all, there are many alternatives to most of your products.

I am obviously on a loosing end of this decision, but I wish you good luck and hope that it will help you make us developers even more productive by making your products even better.

Yet, I’d like to make couple of suggestions:

1. Make subscriptions cheaper to account for lost value (if compared to permanent licenses).

2. Allow us to use timespan-limited license keys as an alternative option to JetBrains accounts to manage our subscriptions: so we can buy a key e.g. for one year, after which the tool stops working.

IDE is basically OS for developer.
Using rented OS that will lock your PC after subscription expires? No way!
Build your developing process relaying on IDE that will completly cease to work if you do not pay? No way!

With all of the blowback on this idea, did anyone freaking out about the “money grab” actually put this into perspective? We are talking about programmers who need an IDE to develop software.

So the price of PhpStorm goes up $25 PER YEAR. That’s about:

1 dinner at a cheap restaurant
or
1 t-shirt
or
1/2 of a pair of pants
or
4 large cups of coffee / beer
or
2 pizzas
or
2 shots of decent whiskey
or
3 trips to Jack in the Box
or
you get the picture. In a freakin’ YEAR! If you added 2 cents per hour to your rate, you would cover this. Do you think anyone is going to complain if you raise your rates 2 cents an hour?

If you can’t afford $25 per year, then realistically you are undercharging, overspending, or really don’t need an IDE to develop your software. Learn how to budget, and get over your shock at actually having to pay for the functionality you use.

Curious about the ‘update’ that should come right about now…
I need to make decisions for my order..
and yes, it will be Jetbrains. But i need to know if to buy another perpetual license right away, ot that i’ll go along with the new subscription model.

Ok guys, I like your products. But I do not like it when you do not give me an option. By changing the license rules towards subscription, you have decided to take less money from me but also take my integrity away. I want to have the option of paying you the same amount, or even MORE, to be able to continue purchasing new products from you, which you will NOT disable when I stop paying you.

The only reason I would stop paying you is because I don’t like your product and have no wish to use it any more. You don’t need to disable it for me. In fact I don’t want to pay for development of a disabler or a kill switch on software I have purchased.

Disabling software on my computer is a flat attack on my integrity. Guess why people are angry. Guess that some of us would pay for being allowed the integrity. This is not an online service on your computer. This is an offline production environment on my computer. I insist on full command of my computer and any software installed on it to be disabled or removed only by myself.

If I am not given an option to purchase new products from you without the kill-switch, then I won’t purchase any more products from you. I don’t have to. You are amazing, but you are certainly not irreplaceable by the free alternatives. Yeah, the license may be cheaper for me – I do pay my licenses regularly and annually. But no, I’d rather pay more than hand you over direct control of my desktop functionality. Think this true. Give me a damn option. You know I want it.

Sounds like you’re an existing user, in which case you will get two years for the price of one when you subscribe. So JetBrains has already done the hard work for you.

All you have to do is pay them once a year, starting the same time next year, and your life with JetBrains products is exactly the way it is right now. You like their products, so you’re probably already paying every year anyway, right?

Oh, you don’t want to pay one year? Well then I guess you go back to the version of the tool you bought, since the new terms are that your payment buys you the current version and the right to try out newer versions. So if you decided not to pay, I guess it would be because you don’t like the current version and thus you don’t want to pay for it.

JetBrains has you covered again! You can use the version you bought forever due to the perpetual fallback license they gave you when you paid!

Oh, you upgraded and then decided not to pay, and now your settings files are not compatible and the .idea project file is not compatible? Well, that’s certainly a bummer. It could take upwards of an hour to reset settings from scratch and possibly as many as 15 minutes to recreate a project structure.

While you’re busy spending that hour and 15 minutes you might ponder how A) JetBrains didn’t force you to update anything, B) you probably should have been trying out a new version of the IDE as a separate install to make sure there were no issues and C) perhaps some source control is in order.

Or, you know, you could complain ad nauseam on the internet because a company decided to change the terms that you get your software for and charge you less money as a consequence.

Max, maybe what you need to do, because there seem to be a bunch of people who can’t control themselves from updating the software on their computer [omg, new shiny thing, must have now], is give them an option of downloading/getting a license that only has the perpetual license part and not the subscription part [same price, same terms].

This way, when an update comes out, the tool will have something like “there’s an update out, but it doesn’t work with your current license. click here to buy an upgrade”.

So you completely remove the temptation of using any version of the tools from them that they don’t have a perpetual license for.

I usually upgraded IDEA only every few years..I kept what I had until some feature I wanted turned out to not be in supported in my current license version, or in Community. With the new pricing, yeah — I will lose the ability to upgrade only when I want to (I can do it, but it won’t be nearly as cost-effective), but I’m actually going to end up paying less than I have in the past.

If I had a nit to pick, it is that the “all products” price point is set wrong. I’d be willing to pay something more for a “Pick 2” bundle (from IDEA, Resharper, AppCode) but there is no real incentive to do that the way things are structured.

My understanding is you get a perpetual license after paying for a year of whatever version.

So buy a year’s worth of upgrade. That’s the real cost for your perpetual “cannot be cut off” license.

The decision is if to pay the cheaper upgrade cost next year, or sit out a year, knowing that “jumping back in” has now been made much more expensive than it used to be.

I think that’s the elephant in the chat room. People don’t want to be penalized for not upgrading every year.

But no one is going to take the IDE out of your cold dead hands…unless you decide to go monthly and bail out at less than 11 months. But don’t do that. Paying for it for a year is cheaper than 12 x the monthly fee anyway. Ignore the monthly model if you hate it. You don’t need it.

The chart at the topic What is perpetual fallback license? should be updated! According to the sales-department JetBrains is going to provide new feature releases more often – so you will fallback not one or two versions back but more than 3.

The honest description for the new license model for annual the annual subscription is “You buy the the exact version available at the time and get tethered for new features so you will be willing to prolong your subscription”.

I don’t think, JetBrains will start porting bugfixes to the elder versions so you must hope, that the version you purchased is more or less bug-free. As an additional punishment for not throwing money at JetBrains you will have to setup up your project-settings in the outdated IDE again if you ommit the annual tribute (as a developer you know, that it is hard if not impossible to implement a backward compatibility for n versions).

Oh man this sucks. I was ready to purchase PHPStorm today and I was so hyped. Then I saw your new licensing subscription and I’m gutted now :((( I’d thought I’d found something better than Eclipse.

The big change from the annual buying price to the new “hiring” price is that if you stop subscription midway through a major release it’ll be stolen from you and you have to go back to the previous version, not good at all!

Frankly, I’m going to keep using my evaluation copy and if JetBrains are still insisting on this underhand way of forcing people to upgrade I’m going back to Eclipse.

IDEA 15 would be the EAP. EAP’s come with licenses that expire relatively soon, to make people try the latest version of it, until the release version comes out when the “real licenses” are what matter.

So, assuming 15’s actual release date is before December 25, you should be entitled to use it.

It’s funny…I only bought Webstorm 10 2 days before this news came out. Initially, I was pissed because I didn’t know that v11 was coming out this soon. When I saw the subscription model, I was like phew. The day I convinced my boss to buy this, I was raving about software such as Webstorm and Sketch, and how they are great low-cost alternatives to the more expensive competitors. Apparently, Jetbrains has got a little too big for their britches. I guess this is fine. All companies evolve, and I’m sure when it all boiled down to it, they felt that this pricing structure is where they need to go. It WILL alienate some customers, but I’m a little sad that it has forgotten or has evolved beyond its humble roots. Personally, I will for a more cost-effective editor elsewhere when I move to Angular 2.o.

I recently purchased a personal license for RubyMine. I actually came back to your site just now to purchase phpStorm, and during the checkout process I discovered that the only option was a yearly subscription. Frankly, I’m puked by this. I did not complete the purchase, nor will I as long as a yearly subscription is required.

I have also been looking at CLion, and I was going to push the company that I work for to buy licenses for all of our c++ developers. A one-time license with minor upgrades and bug fixes included would have been easily sold. However, there’s no way that I can pitch to my employers a yearly subscription. I won’t even bother asking.

I don’t mean for my post to be taken negatively. I just want to make you aware of the mindset of your customers, and let you know that you lost hundreds, if not thousands, from me alone. Hopefully you’ll rethink your licensing options.

Hello David, Our annual subscriptions include a perpetual license, likewise a perpetual license is issued after 12 consecutive payments if you go that route. We just want to be sure that you are aware of this.

Or just buy the latest version (= 12 month subscription) to remain on whatever version you happen to be on. No need to downgrade anything. Unless your focus is on not paying. Which I have nothing to say to.

The point of having the perpetual license was as a fallback to be sure you have access to an IDE in the event you cannot pay. If you could afford another round of subscription, then it’s a non-issue. The point was what happens when you can’t afford it–it has nothing to do with wanting to pay and everything to do with I cannot pay.

So, with that said, if you can’t afford it, you’re stuck on the version at the beginning of the period one year period.

If you can’t afford it you have no customer and nothing to program and don’t need an IDE. Or you can use the previous version you have a license for. Oh please come on, let’s come up with ever more fringy artificial issues.

Why don’t you try working for a large company with a broken budgeting process, or with the gov’t where everything needs to be approved to be installed on your system every upgrade? It’s not a fringe issue for anyone in that environment–it’s a very real outcome of which you have little control.

If you can’t pay for the tools, don’t use them. You can use any editor to create software. Having these tools is a priviledge. If youe employer, government agency cannot see this, try finding a better job

My whole point for responding at all is that I think it’s unfair to say that a perpetual license is available without also mentioning your limited to the version at the start of term, or the one available a year ago.

I find nothing about your “finding a different job comment” amusing, despite the smiley face.

It is BEYOND simple to deal with this situation. Simply stick with the version of JetBrains software that you have a perpetual license for.

Then you never have to worry about having to downgrade to an older version or losing access to it because you didn’t get the licensing money for whatever reason.

And you have complete control over which version you have to keep using. You pay JB for one years subscription, you effectively are buying the current version. You pay JB for two years subscription up front, you get to use every version of JB’s software for the next year [and after the year, you only pay one years subscription for another year of updates that you keep forever].

Yes, that’s possible too–and likely the approach we would take. And that would be fine, until you run into the IDE bug that keeps you from using that version (has also happened).

Guys, I don’t want a raging argument over this. It’s disingenuous to mention the perpetual fallback without mentioning its restrictions. And like it or not, it doesn’t not match what you would get if you had bought a license and a year of support. You get less under this model.

Then make sure that you keep buying the yearly subscription… The fallback perpetual license is a perk so you’re not suddenly SOL. It is FAIR, that if you want to continue to get “support” you will pay for a subscription.

The widely used old-fashioned model (not JetBrains old model) was you buy a licence for one version. You get minor upgrades for free, but when a new version came out, you had to pay for it or stick to the one you’d already paid for.

The new JetBrains model is actually very similar. Assuming a yearly subscription, you pay for a licence to use one version, and get minor upgrades for free. But when a new major version comes out, you get a free “trial” licence to use it. That trial period lasts until the date 12 months from when you last paid. At the end of the trial period, you can either pay another 12 months to “upgrade”, or not pay and stick to the version you paid for.

So if you think you won’t be wanting to pay for a new major version, don’t use it during the “trial” period.

A friend recommended me to check out Web Storm but I was immediately turned off by the subscription model along with the pricing. I’ve used Sublime for years and haven’t found anything to convince me away, but since i’ve made the decision to focus on full-stack Javascript development, this IDE looks very promising and useful.

I would recommend either a much lower subscription pricing structure or a version-locked single time purchase option with the ability to upgrade to newer version(s) for a fee so they can choose if they want or need the continued support and upgrades.

I know continued support and improvements cost resources, such as time or money, but Sublime has a great community of developers that are creating packages for free.

I’m very sad about this kind of news:
killing the small client companies, rent the ide, subscription models without thinking about indie companies under the 10 employees, create an “hostage policy”, don’t grants a real conitnuity in a real, long term, developing plan.
fortunately my trial period didn’t expired before this news, so I could avoid buying the license in time, otherwise I would have been really more disappointed.
I hope you’ll return on your steps, but meanwhile I’m afraid to be forced to use other tools.
Regards.